Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk is a grim, unrelenting experience, and at times so bare-bones in its execution that it risks monotony. Yet, it carries something hypnotic in its excruciating, inevitable march toward oblivion. Adapted from Stephen King’s early work under the sobriquet Richard Bachman, the film belongs to that rare breed of studio releases that seem determined to test our endurance as much as its characters’. The premise is merciless in its simplicity: fifty boys, conscripted by lottery, must keep walking at no less than three miles an hour until only one remains. Drop below the pace too often, and the rifles flanking the road will blow your brains out. The winner is showered in riches and the promise of wishing for anything he wants.
The burden of carrying such a rigorously static idea falls almost entirely on the cast, and Lawrence knows it. There is a watchful decency to Cooper Hoffman as Ray Garraty. He is an everyman figure whose small gestures of kindness quickly mark him as the moral centre. Opposite him is a brilliant, mercurial David Jonsson’s Peter McVries, possessed of a roguish wit that keeps despair at bay for as long as possible. Their companionship is the film’s anchor, and the flicker of human connection in this dystopia designed to extinguish it. Around them gather a band of sharply sketched figures, including Charlie Plummer’s venomous Barkovitch, Ben Wang’s quick-talking Olson, Joshua Odjick’s taciturn Collie, and more. Each is offered just enough shading to register before the inevitable bullet finds them.
The Long Walk (English)
Director: Francis Lawrence
Cast: Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Garrett Wareing, Tut Nyuot, Charlie Plummer, Ben Wang, Roman Griffin Davis, Jordan Gonzalez, Josh Hamilton, Judy Greer and Mark Hamill.
Runtime: 108 minutes
Storyline: 50 boys participate in a grueling dystopic contest where they must continuously walk or be shot by a member of their military escort
This is familiar battle royale territory for Lawrence. But where his Hunger Games films were ornate and grandstanding, here, the choice is austerity. Lawrence makes his dystopia feel almost antique. Cinematographer Jo Willems captures the walkers against a rural America devoid of life, with faded towns, hollow churches, and lone figures on porches who watch the parade of death shuffle past. The imagery feels drained of hope; even the landscape appears resigned. The effect is claustrophobic despite the open road, since there’s nowhere to go but forward and nothing to look at but the people trudging beside you.
This inevitably makes the violence stand out in brutal relief. The gunfire is abrupt and matter-of-fact, and the executions are staged without fanfare, but with enough gore to shock. One boy staggers from exhaustion, another panics and makes a run for it, a third literally shits himself to death — each time, the rifles correct the error, and the repetition is deliberately numbing. King wrote the novel in the shadow of Vietnam, and the film does little to soften its allegory of young men reduced to expendable bodies, sacrificed for a spectacle that offers no escape.
A still from ‘The Long Walk’
| Photo Credit:
Lionsgate Movies
What rescues the film from total despair are the interludes of poignant conversation. The boys swap stories, trade insults, and muse on fathers, mothers, love, and death. There’s an easy rhythm to these exchanges, with a tender touch of Stand by Me transported into this death march. Lawrence and screenwriter JT Mollner (best known for his fantastic Strange Darling) resist the temptation to open up the story with cutaways or elaborate flashbacks. The walk is the story, and the dialogue is the only reprieve. If this choice sometimes leaves the film feeling thin, it also lends it an odd purity. It’s the sense that we, too, are trapped on this road, unable to look away.
The Major, played with a scenery-chewing drawl by Mark Hamill, feels like the film’s sole misstep. He acts out a caricature of militaristic bluster whose sunglasses never leave his face, and is at once too broad for the film’s somberness. Against the stripped-down performances of the boys, Hamill’s bark feels irritatingly out of tune, but thankfully, the error isn’t fatal. The real authority is the road itself, which swallows the walkers one by one with a slow-burn erosion.
By the film’s last miles, the march has shed any illusion of competition, and the test of endurance has become existential. Bodies wear down, minds fray, and the conversations turn inward. Once dangled as salvation, the promised reward recedes into abstraction. Finally, only the tether between Garraty and McVries remains. Their stubborn camaraderie, holding fast in a world bent on annhilating any semblance of solidarity, is crushing in its finality.
The Long Walk is not a flattering watch. It’s repetitive, punishing, and deliberately blunt in its politics, but it carries something uncompromisingly organic. The road goes ever on, but companionship always endures. You’ll never walk alone.
The Long Walk is currently running in theatres
Published – September 12, 2025 05:01 pm IST
