Though we’ve rarely had a year lacking in Stephen King adaptations across the past few decades, 2025 has felt especially King-rich, with four big-screen projects running the gamut of the prolific author’s tones. We started with horror-mode King with The Monkey back in February, then got to uplifting King last month with The Life of Chuck, and the now the autumn is bringing us two of his ‘last man standing’ dystopias – The Long Walk and, later, Edgar Wright’s remake of The Running Man. Though the competition hasn’t exactly been stiff, The Long Walk is definitely the best King of the year so far, one of the grimmest mainstream studio movies in a long time to match one of his most hopeless stories.
Fittingly enough, it’s long-time Hunger Games franchise director Francis Lawrence who has finally brought The Long Walk (one of those books often labelled ‘unfilmable’) to the big screen. In what must have surely served as one of Suzanne Collins’s inspirations, ‘The Long Walk’ is the grim annual tradition of a dystopian America ravaged both physically and economically by an unspecified war in which 50 young men are challenged to simply walk down the road until only one of them is left alive. Any dip below a constant three mile-per-hour pace is met with a warning; collect three warnings and get shot in the head.
Our hero is Ray Garratty (Cooper Hoffman), far from the sportiest contestant but with a warmth of spirit that quickly earns him allies amongst his fellow walkers, most notably the tirelessly driven optimist philosopher Peter McVries (David Jonsson), with whom he develops a friendship that powers the pair of them into the desperate last stages. It’s a hopeful worldview of the power of care and love and companionship, even with the knowledge that only one of them can eventually survive, a deeply necessary salve to the bleakness found everywhere else.
The Long Walk is a gruelling time, sometimes numbingly so (big emotional crescendos, especially at the very end, too often just fade into the rest of the background bleakness), but the moments of camaraderie are legitimately moving. Lawrence and writer JT Mollner manage to give a lot of the boys real, effective character beats even amongst the endlessly repetitive action, from Ray and Pete’s friendship to boisterous shit-talker Hank (Ben Wang) and the more antagonistic walkers like the instantly unpopular Barkovitch (Charlie Plummer).
In what must have been an absolute nightmare shoot (I can’t even imagine the logistical headaches of a story in which constant forward motion is the crux), the cast are very convincing as they suffer through nightmarish trauma yet find time to share jokes and games. First among equals, though, is Jonsson, who continues to just go from strength to strength as an actor and is endlessly compelling here – pretty much all of the most effective emotional beats go directly through him. Hoffman is a little plainer in the lead, somewhat restricted by Ray’s everyman nature and the film’s complete commitment to its unerringly grim tone.
The Long Walk was originally written as a Vietnam War allegory, young men on a pointless march into pointless, violent death. Despite the 60-odd years between King’s first draft of the novel and this cinematic take, that initial intent still really shines through, right down to the costume designs of the walking boys feeling like they would comfortably fit into a ‘60s jungle. It’s an intriguing approach from Lawrence to not really modernise much, actually feeling like one of the bolder choices in a film already impressively uncompromising (look out for the multiple graphic and dramatic shitting sequences). There’s some real guts behind The Long Walk, but ultimately not quite enough heart.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 