THE LONG WALK (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

The Long Walk, Lionsgate

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | September 11, 2025

The sheer simplicity of director Francis Lawrence's The Long Walk is a significant part of the reason this adaptation of what must be Stephen King's bleakest novel is as powerfully upsetting as it is. Be warned: There is not a shred of hope in this story. Even when the film suggests that someone might be able to find a sliver of optimism somewhere within its characters or narrative, that thought is repeatedly shattered by a solider shouting a warning, the desperate pleadings of a young man who once believed in something, and the sharp report of a rifle being fired, silencing and ending any belief in anything for good.

One of the strengths of King's book, like so many of his best works, is that its characters feel real, genuine, and alive, and with the cast of actors the filmmakers have assembled here, that quality comes through in JT Mollner's screenplay and the film more broadly, as well. We get a sense of these young men, as well as boys pretending to be men, just from the look of them. They are desperate but with some thought that their efforts will pay off, poor but with the notion that working toward this elusive goal will earn them riches beyond their imaginations, and fully unaware of the absolute hell their bodies and minds are about to experience, until that is the only thing left for them to experience.

It's little wonder that many saw King's story as an allegory for the Vietnam War, since he wrote it in the 1960s—before he even had a career as a writer. With the rise of nationalism and its intrinsic militarism around the globe in recent years, we realize that, like the best allegories, King's tale could fit into just about any period of contemporary history in some way. That it feels relevant now is not to King's credit as some kind of literary prophet. It is our fault and, no matter what happens this time around, likely will be again.

Lawrence and his crew take that chronologically non-specific approach, too, giving us a sense of a United States in some dystopian future that often looks and sounds as if it exists in some period of the past. Some things—economic struggles, financial desperation, some powerful people's belief that the only power that matters comes from how they can use firearms or order others to use them—are so cyclical that they are essentially timeless.

The young men here are dressed as if they walked off the farm or emerged from some small town during the Great Depression. Why shouldn't they? In moments of necessary camaraderie, they sing songs that have probably been forgotten in recent generations, but who's to say what old tunes and tales won't be discovered again in the future? They meant something then, could mean something now, and might mean much to people who have gone through one nightmare before winding up in this one.

That first nightmare, as we learn in the briefest of exposition, was another civil war in the country. It resulted in totalitarian rule, economic devastation, and the outlawing of even any talk of the way things used to be. Each year, a group of 50 young men, all of them volunteers, are selected for a competition. They will walk until only one remains. There is no finish line, the gruff Major (Mark Hamill) leading the soldiers overseeing the Long Walk announces to the ten lines of five young men a piece. It is an endurance content—broadcast across the country to encourage the idea of work ethic among those who might have forgotten it in their many, many troubles.

The rules are simple. Everyone must walk at a pace of at least three miles per hour. Anyone who falls behind that pace is given a warning and ten seconds to resume speed. If they don't, there's a second warning, then a third, and then the end of the competition for that walker.

The awful twist, revealed fairly quickly after some poor boy gets a charley horse, is that failure means instant death. In other words, every character we meet here—no matter how minimal or significant an impact he may have in this story—but one will be dead by the end of the contest. One young man keeps going on a broken ankle that becomes a bloody right angle of the hem of his pants and his shoe. Another keeps receiving warnings, because his bowels will not cooperate with his survival instinct. Some of them just stop, because there is no longer anything left in their minds or bodies to keep them going.

Each and every death, even the ones that happen off-screen and are referenced as a bulk number the morning after the walkers first night, in this story matters. It is not just because they are so gruesome and always so senseless. The film so immediately and firmly establishes its world, its rules, its abundance of metaphor, and its humanity that it could be no other way. We stay with the group, in its dwindling number, through the entire film. There are no scenes of what's happening in the world outside of the walk, because all of that is irrelevant.

Instead, we're with Raymond (Cooper Hoffman) from the start, who volunteered to prove and do something, revealed much later. After his mother (a devastating Judy Greer) pleads for him to rethink his plan, Raymond gathers with the other 49 competitors, talks to a few, and lines up with them all. He makes some friends, such as a friendship can be under the circumstances, with a few—mainly Peter (David Jonsson, a standout in an exceptional cast), who somehow does have hope and a belief that people can make a difference—and at least one enemy—namely Gary (Charlie Plummer), a scrawny bully. Once Gary's actions have inevitable consequences for another walker, by the way, he shows he is really no more a villain than any of these desperate young men.

Passing by expanses of fields and little towns and the occasional local who can't help but watch the death march in front of them, the young men talk. They joke, sing, encourage each other, philosophize about how there's no such thing as choice in such times and under such a system, imagine what they'll do with the prize money and a guaranteed wish, and reminiscence about how each of them got here.

It means something, because, ultimately, it will mean nothing for so many, if not all, of these young men in the end (Jo Willems' washed-out cinematography is a constant, subconscious reminder of that). Isn't that just the way it is? As in trying times and life in general, it most certainly is in The Long Walk, a potent film about the sorrowful state of and of sorrow for humanity.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products

Buy the Book

Buy the Book (Kindle Edition)