The Long Walk Is The King Of The Dystopian Thriller
Stephen King’s harrowing novel gets the perfect big-screen upgrade.
It feels counterintuitive, not to mention glib, to say that The Long Walk is arriving late to any trend, but that’s a bit what it feels like to be watching this adaptation in the year 2025.
Stephen King’s “first” novel — the one he wrote at the ripe age of 19 but didn’t publish until years later — is one of many stories about a dangerous game enforced by a totalitarian regime. The book is favored by King aficionados the world over, but it was also considered borderline impossible to adapt. So it remained on the shelves, while splashier successors took the slow-drip dread of King’s tale and repackaged it for the big screen. The Hunger Games was arguably the splashiest of those offerings, and while that franchise is enjoying something of a resurgence now, it’s lost a bit of its luster since becoming a modern classic. It’s hard to invest in a dystopian world that seems only steps removed from our own: why watch fictional heroes tear each other apart when we can doomscroll for the same effect?
Such is the hurdle that The Long Walk finds itself facing — but it’s one that the film clears easily. Its familiar premise is just the set dressing for a much more intimate story. With masterful direction, heart-wrenching performances, and a harrowing survival tale in perpetual motion, The Long Walk smoothly snatches back it legacy as the king of the dystopian fable. It might also be one of the greatest King adaptations ever made.
The America of The Long Walk feels like an apt mirror for our own.
The Long Walk is, fittingly, directed by Francis Lawrence, who helmed all but one chapter of Lionsgate’s Hunger Games saga and naturally feels right at home behind the camera here. The similarities between these properties don’t end there: The Long Walk may not be the progenitor of fatal competitions, but The Hunger Games clearly owes a lot to King. Fortunately, The Long Walk puts in the legwork to distinguish itself early on, trading a futuristic arena for the comparatively modest menace of a rural open road. Instead of tributes fighting to murder each other, the 50 young men participating in the Long Walk just have to keep moving until only one of them remains. If they fall below the speed of three miles per hour for longer than 30 seconds, they’re executed by the soldiers ferrying them down the road. That means no stopping to retie shoes, no bathroom breaks, no bedtime, and, as their enigmatic enforcer, the Major (Mark Hammil) archly explains, “no finish line.”
From where we stand, it couldn’t get much bleaker than that, but a majority of the young men submitting to the challenge have done so willingly — or, at least, they’ve been tricked into thinking as much. The nebbish Harkness (Jordan Gonzalez) wants to write a book about the marathon itself, and discusses its legacy with ecstatic wonder. Others, like the charismatic Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman), are walking with something to prove, either to estranged family members or to their own adolescent hubris. And the rest have been lured by the promise of untold riches and the granting of a wish. In this battered alt-universe America, resources are more than scarce. The Major encourages compliance by banning “dangerous” books and keeping the country desperate, ignorant, and reliant on this sick and twisted lottery. Everyone’s marching toward an end of some kind; at least the Long Walk lets a lucky few fight for a better life.
Hammil is a pitch-perfect menace as the Major, but The Long Walk belongs to its young cast.
At the start of the Long Walk, only the shrewd Peter McVries (David Jonsson) seems to understand the futility of the game. He’s under no illusions about the toll of this competition, even for its eventual winner — and that makes him a compelling foil for Garraty. The duo spends the bulk of the film discussing their lives, their beliefs, and the circumstances that compelled them to walk. Together, they’re the heart of the film, leading a locked-in ensemble to Hell and back.
The concept of chemistry feels low on most films’ list of priorities, but Hoffman and Jonsson affirm its value a thousand times over. Their portrayals of Garraty and McVries sing with specificity: it’s as if they were born to play these characters, and more importantly, to share the screen with each other.
As with King’s novel, The Long Walk is defined by dialogue, with conversations between Garraty and his competitors driving the bulk of the story. Aside from the odd flashback, the film never strays from this open road, with each introspective debate diligently unspooling the psyches of our major players. The script by JT Mollner crafts a deft, shockingly empathetic character study from its source material, giving us one of the most nuanced on-screen portrayals of boyhood in years. But make no mistake: this is still a Stephen King story, and the film wastes no time living up to the author’s reputation.
The Long Walk wouldn’t work without compelling performances, and Hoffman and Jonsson deliver in spades.
The Long Walk is punctuated by one harrowing fatality after the next, some brought on by conditions as banal as a charley horse or a nosebleed. As the body count grows, we watch eager, even arrogant, contestants lose their innocence in real time. It’s the kind of desolation typically reserved for the horrors of war; given that King reportedly penned this story in response to the Vietnam draft, the comparison is more than apt.
Sticking with the film through its twists and turns is a test of endurance in itself. Fortunately, its brutality walks hand-in-hand with some surprisingly gentle, emotional moments, both shouldered effortlessly in The Long Walk’s brilliant leading performances. Perversely, you almost don’t want it to end: its circumstances couldn’t be crueler, but a film like this doesn’t come around that often.
