‘The task is simple: walk or die.’
The Long Walk (2025), directed by Francis Lawrence, is the latest Stephen King book-to-film adaptation. While the premise of the film simply is ‘walk or die’, The Long Walk carries so much more allure and emotional magnitude than this simple tagline might suggest.
In a desolate, dystopian America, 50 young men, each representing their home state, are selected by lottery to participate in a death-game contest. Their goal: to walk the furthest, never dropping speed below 3 miles per hour (4 in the book). If their speed falls, they are granted a warning and ten seconds to resume, after three warnings, anyone who fail to regain speed in time, or strays from the road, is removed from the competition – by being mercilessly shot dead by the soldiers accompanying them.
This bleak, gruesome survival contest exists within a world where the authoritarian regime promotes this violent massacre as spectacle to motivate the discontented populace, offering a distorted sense of hope and improvement in times of economic and social collapse.
Based on Stephen King’s 1979 novel of the same name (before he was the master of horror, King wrote dystopian fiction under the pseudonym Richard Bachman), The Long Walk, much like The Running Man, another King adaptation set for release this year, can be better categorised as dystopian thriller-horror as opposed to the more acute horror King is better known for.
A brutal, unforgettable dystopia
The Long Walk is filled with vivid, wholly unforgettable violence and devastating, grotesque deaths. Although Lawrence and screenwriter JT Mollner made some significant changes to the source material for this adaptation, these never dilute or downplay the gruelling brutality and horror, nor the touching sense of camaraderie and friendship which sustains at both the book and this film’s centre.
The Long Walk (2025) focuses primarily on the friendship which develops, over the course of the 350 mile walk, between the sensitive, yet invigorated Raymond Garraty (played by Cooper Hoffman, on spectacular form) and the confident, optimistic Peter McVries (played by the always magnetic David Jonsson).
Stellar performances from the next generation
Starring opposite each other in this film and carrying its emotional weight with ease, Hoffman and Jonsson are two of the best young actors working right now. These two are the future of the film industry, because, my god, their respective performances in The Long Walk are astonishing.
Cooper Hoffman’s Ray, is the first of all the participants we met, as he approaches the start-line in the car with his anxious mother, played by Judy Greer. After a gut-wrenching goodbye – this film had me crying from the very first scene, which certainly foreshadows the emotional pull of this film, and the devastated mess I was upon its’ conclusion– Ray joins the communion of boys waiting with mixed anticipation at the start line. He quickly introduces himself to the confident, sleeves rolled-up Pete (Jonsson), and sets about the foundation of one of the most palpable, enduring, and genuinely moving, male friendship in recent cinema.
In a contest where every man for himself is the default mentality, these two boys finds way to help each other, and even their fellow contestants, stay motivated, morally righteous, grounded, and most importantly, alive, as they fight exhaustion, sleep, insanity, and the natural elements, whilst they trudge through a ceaseless, gothic Americana wasteland.
Whilst the loud, antagonistic Major, played with rather incongruous cartoonish-ness by Mark Hamill, commands the exhausted and dwindling kids onwards, cinematographer Jo Willems’s controlled camera continuously ushers the contestants and the audience along the winding road through this ceaseless landscape, capturing the palpable suffering, fatigue, and grief the central characters are faced with.
Despite being offered little backstory for any of the contestants, the audience feels an unwavering attachment towards them. Affected by the haunting hardships they experience during the long walk, and by the unexpected optimism in the personable, realistic yet highly cinematic conversations and banter between Ray and Pete especially, but also their dynamic with other compelling contestants too, such as the good-natured Arthur (Tut Nyuot), the cocky but vulnerable Olson (Ben Wang), as well as the callous bully Barkovitch (performed with superbly unnerving effect by Charlie Plummer).
A cast that carries the heart of the story
This cast of staggeringly talented young actors gives this film its heart, its tragedy, its brutality, and its message about the relentless nature of humanity.
The Long Walk’s timely political and social commentary, about dystopian authoritarianism, violence as spectacle, and Orwellian censorship is plain to see, and although King wrote the book in the late 1960s as an allegory for the pointless slaughter of the Vietnam War (and the resilience of male comradeship that came with it), it would seem this bleak tale about the plight of struggling young men in a fascist society is still as timely as ever.
Director Francis Lawrence is no stranger to this type of dark story about a vicious death-game spectacle under a fascist regime, having directed the Hunger Games franchise (2012-2023). As an experienced master of dystopian book to film adaptations, Lawrence excels in bringing to life these disturbing, immersive dystopian worlds, and their vicious contests, on screen. Stylistically, The Long Walk is very different to the likes of The Hunger Games, lacking in the glittery, flamboyant theatricality and extensive world-building characteristic of the latter.
However, the two do share similarities in terms of focalising on the gritty, desolate, violent circumstances, and prioritising characterisation, by focusing on the profound hardships, emotional turmoil and endurance, and, most importantly, on the irrevocable, instinctive connections the central characters create under such unimaginable circumstances.
With its’ stellar young cast, gorgeous score by Jeremiah Fraites, and faultless writing and directing from Mollner and Lawrence respectively, The Long Walk is a visceral, captivating, and gruelingly violent exploration of humanity’s best and worst traits. The film highlighting how, even in the face of relentless, inhumane cruelty, individuals can, against all odds, choose to keep their humanity intact. Sometimes it really is (even in life or death situations) just about the friends you made along the way.
