After Paramount’s Pet Sematary took Stephen King’s eviscerating classic in a bold (and disappointing) new direction, prolific writer, actor, and director Alex Ross Perry (Listen Up Philip, Queen Of Earth) is set to put his own stamp on a King story. This one, 2003's “Rest Stop,” isn’t as well known as any of King’s novels, however, having appeared first in Esquire before setting into the pages of his 2008 collection Just After Sunset. Besides, prolonging a short into a feature inevitably requires a bit of tinkering.
But the gulf between story and synopsis here is wide. Variety describes Perry’s film as “a propulsive cat-and-mouse thriller that follows the twisted journey of two women after a fateful encounter at a highway rest stop.” King’s story, meanwhile, follows an author who, in a Dark Half-style twist, assumes the persona of his pen name to stop a domestic abuse incident at the titular rest stop. There is no cat or mouse, simply a man struggling with the courage it takes to intercede when one is witness to an incident of abuse.
Still, we remain optimistic. Perry is a striking filmmaker, and we described his latest, the Elisabeth Moss-starring Her Smell, as “a claustrophobic panic attack of a melodrama” (in a good way!). There’s no release date as of yet, but you’ll have plenty of other King adaptations to keep you company until then, be it It: Chapter Two, James Wan’s The Tommyknockers, Amazon’s Dark Tower, or J.J. Abrams and Apple’s Lisey’s Story.