Review: The Long Walk

Francis Lawrence’s adaptation of Stephen King’s once-pseudonymous novella (penned under “Richard Bachman”) is a relentless, bruising endurance test, equal parts allegory, horror, and hangout movie. It’s also the sort of bleak, unsparing studio picture that seems like a relic from another time, back when anti-war polemics and dystopian parables could sneak into the multiplex disguised as genre entertainment.

The premise could fit neatly on a recruiting poster for a fascist state: fifty boys, chosen by lottery, are forced to walk an endless stretch of American heartland at three miles per hour. Drop below the pace three times and you’re executed on the spot. Last boy standing wins a fortune and one wish. The hook is cruelly simple, “keep moving or die”—and the spectacle is broadcast live to a numbed nation, a ritual sacrifice staged as both punishment and propaganda.

Lawrence knows his way around a state-sanctioned bloodsport, having shepherded four Hunger Games entries. But where those films were slickly designed YA blockbusters, The Long Walk is stripped down, closer to an endurance play than a franchise installment. He also takes a high-concept premise and injects a great deal of heart into it. The road is filmed in Manitoba, an expanse of flat asphalt bordered by endless sky and occasional Gothic Americana: lonesome churches, half-abandoned towns, billboards clinging to empty slogans.

JT Mollner’s screenplay is admirably lean. There are flashbacks only in passing, no detours to the “outside world,” and little in the way of exposition. Instead, character is revealed in conversation, banter, and silence. Pete McVries (David Jonsson) becomes the emotional anchor, a boy determined to find the light in a bleak situation. His quiet empathy rubs off on Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman), who gradually shifts from reluctant participant to something like a leader. Their friendship, fragile and doomed, forms the film’s heartbeat.

The ensemble is uniformly strong, with each boy afforded a sliver of humanity before the inevitable comes calling. Even Barkovich (Charlie Plummer), the closest thing to a bully in the pack, is shaded with compassion; the script refuses to render villains among the condemned. Violence is handled with restraint, sometimes shocking in its immediacy, sometimes blurred by distance, but never fetishized and always impactful. Death is constant, but the point is not spectacle; it’s accumulation. Every loss weighs on those still walking, and on us.

Hovering above it all is Mark Hamill’s Major, barking platitudes through dark sunglasses like a small-town coach cosplaying as a demagogue. His rare close-ups verge on caricature, but Lawrence wisely keeps him at the margins most of the time, a looming embodiment of the state’s cruelty. The less we see of him, the more oppressive he feels.

What keeps the film from total despair is the boys themselves. Between cramps, blisters, and worse indignities, they still swap stories, tease one another, and occasionally shout in unison: “Fuck the Long Walk!” Those flickers of camaraderie are enough to spark defiance, even if the outcome is preordained. The state may control the rules, but it can’t quite extinguish solidarity.

Of course, the allegory is as unsubtle as a warning shot: King conceived the novella in the shadow of Vietnam, but in 2025 the story feels reloaded for financial precocity, authoritarian drift, and the numbing spectacle of violence on loop. The Long Walk doesn’t update those themes so much as drag them, blistered and bleeding, into the light again.

It’s a brutal film, but never hollow. By the time the last footsteps echo across the empty asphalt, what lingers isn’t the carnage, it’s the stubborn humanity that survives even as bodies fall. Lawrence’s marathon finally delivers this long-gestating adaptation to the screen, and in doing so, proves that sometimes the slowest, bleakest journeys can still arrive with a thundering impact.

4/5