The Long Walk is in the top tier of King adaptations

Friday, 12 September 2025

The Long Walk (R16, 108 mins) Directed by Francis Lawrence ****½

The Long Walk is in the top tier of King adaptations.

We are in North America, and the year looks to be sometime in the late 1960s. But this United States exists in parallel to the one we know.

The nation is in a deep depression. A catastrophic war a decade or two back has wrecked the economy and the cohesion of the place, and a military government is in charge.

To keep the population distracted and compliant, the government hosts a series of grim spectacles and contests, and chief among these is The Long Walk.

Jake Kennerd, Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson in The Long Walk, in which teens participate in a grueling high-stakes contest where they must continuously walk or be shot by a member of their military escort.

The rules of The Long Walk couldn't be much simpler or less forgiving. Fifty young men start at dawn on day one, and then they walk. No stops or rest are permitted, and if your speed drops below 3 miles per hour for more than 30 seconds, then the walk is over for you. When one walker is left, that boy is declared the winner, and money and fame are heaped upon him.

The Long Walk is based on a very early novel by Stephen King. King, writing as Richard Bachman, completed the book in 1968. But it was not published until 1979, after King had found fame with Carrie.

There are 100 walkers in King's original story, and other incidents have been added, deleted or altered, but The Long Walk - the film - is being hailed as a faithful adaptation of the source, which keeps the spirit and the horrors of the story intact.

The Long Walk is based on the 1979 novel of the same name by Stephen King (under his pseudonym Richard Bachman).

I was lucky, I guess, in that I dropped into a Wednesday night preview screening of The Long Walk knowing next to nothing. I hadn't watched the trailer - which, as usual, gives too much away - and I haven't read the book. Also, being the distractible muppet that I am, I don't think I even noticed that R16 sticker on the poster.

So the violence of The Long Walk, which arrives early and unadorned, shocked and jolted me at first. But later, driving home with a Wellington gale whipping across the harbour and the moon lighting up the road ahead, it wasn't the brutality of the film I thought about. It was the humanity and intelligence.

It seems kind of right and appropriate that The Long Walk is directed by Francis Lawrence. Lawrence has directed four films in The Hunger Games series. And no one much doubts that King's novel - along with the Japanese film Battle Royale - lent some pretty crucial DNA to The Hunger Games books.

But The Long Walk exists in a place that is a million miles away from the teen-baiting franchises that make up so much of dystopian fiction today.

This is a survival story stripped back to its absolute core, with no ornamentation and bugger all sentiment. And yet, the writing and the film-making are strong. And so, The Long Walk never becomes unendurable, cynical or exploitative. Quite the opposite.

At the centre of the film are the characters of Ray Garraty and Peter McVries. Garraty is played by Cooper Hoffman, who is the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. And McVries is played by David Jonsson, from Alien: Romulus. I know that picking awards and nominations is a mugs game. And maybe The Long Walk won't get the box office traction it'll need to get on to the judges’ radars.

Mark Hamill as The Major in The Long Walk, a dystopian survival thriller.

But if it were up to me, Jonsson at least would be getting a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his work here, and Hoffman wouldn't be far behind him.

Around these two, every actor on screen is strong. Including Mark Hamill, as a barking sociopath in army greens who the boys know only as 'The Major'.

I think The Long Walk is an exceptional film. Whether you see it as a satire, or as a study of disparate characters being taken to a breaking point, I reckon it'll stand a comparison to Sydney Pollack's 1969 They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

I went in cold, with no expectations, which is always a wonderful way to see any film. But even if I had been forewarned, I still think I would have left the cinema thinking I'd just seen one of the strongest thrillers of the year, and one of the best Stephen King adaptations for decades.

On a big screen, with Jeremiah Fraites’ - The Lumineers - music pouring out of the speakers, I reckon you might be as impressed as I was.

The Long Walk is in cinemas. They Shoot Horses, Don't They? is only available on DVD. Don't you wish you still had a DVD player?