Jonah Naplan September 12, 2025
“The Long Walk” would already be a hard watch by itself, but the events that unfolded in our country this week make it even harder.
It’s an “upsetting” movie, to use a term that gets thrown around like confetti in the media these days. Not just because of the unforgiving violence it depicts, but because of the version of America it presents. The movie takes place in a dystopian, totalitarian version of the world we know, but it’s creepily, perhaps “upsettingly,” not too far off from it. The scenery appears to be from the east coast. The characters all look like us, talk like us, and act like us. They have families, dreams, wants, and needs. They have lives beyond the purview of this story. And they’re all reckoning with death in a losing battle.
The tragedies hit us like a punch to the gut. We feel sick for the characters. As soon as we’ve invested our trust in one of them, they’re gone in the blink of an eye. We learn to despise their superiors. We consider what’s coming and contemplate a way out. We’re with these people every step of their journey. “The Long Walk” is a great movie because it makes us feel these feelings. Not once does it hold the hand of the audience or paint violence in any sort of gentle light. It’s raw, incessant, and appropriately disturbing.
It would be impossible not to get political when discussing this movie. The best writing about “The Long Walk” will have to, in some way, incorporate references to current events, people, and/or legislative action in order to be considered cogent analysis of a film that deeply concerns itself with our society and suggests that if we’re not careful, we may end up surrendering ourselves to a government where guns make the decisions. If you’re feeling particularly triggered this week, don’t see this movie yet. Wait a couple months for the dust to settle. But do see it, eventually.
Based on the 1979 novel by Stephen King, “The Long Walk” holds a simple but terrifying plot. A group of young men have volunteered for a contest that will either reward them with riches or kill them. They must walk for as long as they can, day and night, through heat and rain, nonstop, at a pace of three miles per hour, until only one remains. Slowing down for ten seconds earns you a warning, thirty seconds earns you a bullet to the head. The boys are followed by a garrison of soldiers, armed with M16 rifles, headed by The Major (Mark Hamill), a sneering general who taunts the walkers as they struggle and, ultimately, perish.
Out of the 50 boys competing, it’s clear who our focus should be on. Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) is sort of the main character, introduced at the very beginning sharing an emotional goodbye with his mother Ginnie (Judy Greer). In approaching the starting line, he makes fast friends with Peter McVries (David Jonsson), a charming young man looking for the light at the end of this dark tunnel. They both have different reasons for competing, and different wishes they’d want to be granted if they’re lucky enough to emerge on the other side. But we know only one of them can live.
Other star supporting players include Hank (Ben Wang), Gary (Charlie Plummer), Arthur (Tut Nyuot), and Stebbins (Garrett Wareing), all characters who we fear we’ll get too attached to before they meet their horrifying end. We learn about them as they walk. They develop camaraderie and relationships, make friends and enemies, and fight, physically and mentally. Sometimes their fighting turns into a tragic accident that results in casualty. Sometimes they’re too tired to fight and can only focus on putting one foot in front of the other. As more and more time passes, the on-screen marker lets us know what mile the boys are on. Expect pained groans from the audience as the number increases.
What’s the significance of the story? Well, plainly, it’s a living (or walking) hell. The pain these boys endure for days on end is immeasurable, and despite their hopes and dreams, we have to wonder why they signed up in the first place. “There’s one winner, and no finish line,” The Major raves at the start, suggesting the Long Walk as being the physical “Road to Hell” and positioning the garrison as the procession that leads them there. I don’t think there’s been a more effective illustration of the proverbial cavalcade that terminates with the inevitability of death since Charlotte Wells’s “Aftersun.” The trail feels sacred and well-trodden, as if we’ve traveled it many times before. The characters even lay their deathbed by managing to catch some sleep while they walk. Indeed, when the boys begin their first mile, we get the impression they’ve just signed their lives away to the Devil himself.
Director Francis Lawrence, working from a script by JT Mollner, has reckoned with this sort of Darwinist “survival of the fittest” phantasmagoria before with all of the recent “Hunger Games” movies, including the surprisingly excellent “Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.” He’s a great director of ensembles, known for getting a great performance out of everybody and making the audience not sure where to look first because the whole cast is so excellent. Of course, this is the case with “The Long Walk,” too, a film that relies on our attachment to the characters as its baseline. That way, the deaths are extra jarring and extra, extra disquieting. If you go into “The Long Walk” expecting to see a “traditional” adaptation of a young adult novel like the aforementioned Lawrence-directed franchise, the “Maze Runner,” “Divergent,” “Twilight,” or “Harry Potter” movies, you’ll be grossly outraged. “The Long Walk” shares more DNA with fellow Stephen King adaptations built around young male bonding and friendship in a rural setting like “It” and “Stand By Me,” while it has the ugly violence and shock value of the “Evil Dead” and “Final Destination” franchises. Anytime you think “The Long Walk” won’t go somewhere, it goes there, whether with gore, guts, broken bones, or even human waste.
The whole thing is going to cause a commotion, especially this week, which reminded the nation that disturbing video clips (even uncensored ones) can spread across the web like wildfire and inevitably wind up on our feed, along with newly resurfaced adjacent ones from however long ago just because they’re all part of the same political conversation. “The Long Walk” is so violently distressing at times that it feels like something you might stumble upon on Reddit without an NSFW warning proceeding it and then feel like your eyes have been burned. Whether or not the movie goes too far will be a question for the audiences, who will undeniably leave it deeply distraught, if otherwise angry or hopeless.
That Lawrence takes the film in this direction is admirable, all the way to its powerful ending, one of those conclusions that feels thematically right even if it does not, by any means, leave us with a smile on our faces. Even so, it’s a less nihilistic ending than that of King’s novel, which proved that there’s no “ideal” way to conclude a tale so fraught with horror. Cinematographer Jo Willems does an excellent job of creating a bleak atmosphere without so much as a shred of optimism. Sometimes he frames the characters from wide perspective angles that crudely show just how small they are compared to the vast, endless landscape of rural America. The camera’s way of making it seem as though the boys are working up an eternal mountain is a nauseating device, and the rhythm of footsteps, one in front of the other, over and over again, gets imprinted in our heads so firmly that when it’s interrupted—whether by gunshots, fights, or other outbursts of violence—we feel particularly caught off-guard.
Are the guns really necessary? It’s a question I kept asking myself throughout “The Long Walk,” but, thinking about the tragedies we keep seeing in the news week after week, year after year, the answer feels somewhat obvious. Among the most heartbreaking scenes in the film is a moment where McVries confides in Garraty that he was kind of expecting to see a tiny flag with the word “Bang!” on it instead of a bullet when the first shot was fired, signaling it’s all just a gag. And yet, whether the boys are willing to accept it or not, these guns are in fact real and can take a life in an instant. They need to be part of the story because it adds more stakes to the walk, which only ends when all but one of the contestants have been physically terminated rather than tapped out. The all-too-familiar weapons show no mercy; if anything, they only draw out the suffering by refraining from “ending it all” until the thirty seconds are up.
“The Long Walk” is also a movie about desensitization and how we, as a society, have become so horribly accustomed to seeing violence in the media, perhaps to the point of glamorization. This idea is reflected in the characters, who ultimately reach a point where they’re no longer affected by the killings all around them, and are just too tired to react. This normalization of death and destruction is particularly haunting in 2025, while one of the most unsettling aspects of this supposedly “dystopian” society is the families who set up lawn chairs along the road, watching as the boys walk by, taking pleasure in their pain like the Romans used to watch gladiators slaughtering each other in an arena for kicks.
There’s a lot about “The Long Walk” that will rub people the wrong way, and broad generalizations such as “torture porn” and “violence for violence’s sake” will be tossed in its direction. And yet, Lawrence has buried so many cinematic gifts underneath all the carnage that it can be admired as a masterwork of pacing, both literally and figuratively, based entirely on its own terms. For a 108-minute movie about a group of people walking, it’s remarkable how it never for a second becomes boring. The feet in this movie both propel characters forward and move the story along at a steady clip, utterly mesmerizing in its will to take risks and show us things we just can’t unsee.
Now playing in theaters.