For a movie that was a long time coming, The Long Walk feels unsettlingly relevant. Though the Stephen King novel on which the movie is based was published in 1979 (under the pseudonym Richard Bachman), its inception dates to the late ’60s, when young men faced a draft lottery that could send them to the Vietnam War. The novel also involves a high-stakes lottery, and the parallels are tough to miss.
Viewers to whom Vietnam is distant history, however, may be more likely to see The Long Walk as a precursor to The Hunger Games. In what almost feels like an inside joke, Lionsgate Films hired Francis Lawrence, who helmed four of the movies in that blockbuster franchise, to direct a belated adaptation of King’s tale.
The deal
Nineteen years after a devastating war, a totalitarian government keeps promising to return an impoverished U.S. to its former glory. Key to this project is an annual televised contest called the Long Walk, in which 50 young male volunteers — one chosen from each state by lottery — compete for riches and the fulfillment of a wish of their choice.
All they have to do is walk down a country highway at three miles per hour until only one man is left standing. Those who fall consistently below speed or try to flee get a swift bullet in the head from their military escort. The Major (Mark Hamill), who’s in charge of this ordeal, allows no breaks, appeals or exceptions.
None of that has stopped Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) from volunteering. He has his reasons, as does the scarred Peter McVries (David Jonsson), who becomes Ray’s fast friend on the road and helps him form an informal alliance with two other walkers (Tut Nyuot and Ben Wang). This underdog crew contends with loose cannon Barkovitch (Charlie Plummer) and seemingly unstoppable athlete Stebbins (Garrett Wareing) as they chase a dream of victory that appears increasingly absurd.
Will you like it?
The world of Lawrence’s Hunger Games films is elaborate and high-budget, with televised death games taking place in technologically advanced arenas. For The Long Walk, the filmmaker smartly chose the opposite approach. The central scenario is all the more gripping for its minimalism, the world around it barely a charcoal sketch.
While no year is specified, the depopulated setting has a profoundly 1970s vibe, down to the long, low cars and clunky digital watches. The latter have anachronistic functions, however, because The Long Walk is a dark future as imagined by someone who’s been watching news reports on the oil crisis and Jonestown.
The movie’s visual drabness is an effective shorthand for exposition, allowing Lawrence and screenwriter JT Mollner to keep the focus on the characters. Long scenes play out with the camera creeping in front of the walkers, trapping us in their plight. Rarely do we leave the road even for a crane or drone shot of the landscape, and when we do, it’s like waking from a nightmare.
Though little external combat occurs, The Long Walk plays out like a war movie, with the walkers bonding, revealing secrets and pondering what it all means as their comrades die around them. The character arcs are boilerplate enough that you guess most of those “secrets” before they emerge. But the young actors elevate the material with raw, heartfelt work, especially Hoffman as the fresh-faced yet deeply cynical hometown boy, Jonsson as the philosopher and stubborn optimist of the crew, and Wang as a jokester who won’t stop superstitiously chewing the same piece of gum.
The story’s central enigma is why anyone volunteers to participate in this death march, as the screenplay emphasizes they do. Only a few of the characters reveal their reasons. Some viewers may find this an insurmountable barrier to identification, but others will appreciate how, as the Long Walk stretches over hundreds of miles, the film evolves into a cautionary tale about how oppression twists our hopes and dreams into the instruments of our own destruction. And yes, maybe it’s also a metaphor for life itself.
The desaturated skies of The Long Walk are heavy with a smoggy dread of societal collapse that’s familiar from old “future shock” visions such as Mad Max and Escape From New York. But echoes of more recent rhetoric also ring loud and clear when the Major manipulates the doomed contestants by equating their suffering with manly dominance and a return to the American work ethic. There’s no especially subtle or sophisticated messaging in this grueling little tale, but it grips us all the way to the bitter end of the road.
If you like this, try…
The Mist (2007; Paramount+, YouTube Primetime, rentable): Frank Darabont, who owned the rights to The Long Road for years, gave his adaptation of another King story one of the grimmest endings in movie history.
Strange Darling (2023; Paramount+, YouTube Primetime, rentable): By coincidence, I just caught this indie neo-noir directed by Mollner, who wrote The Long Walk. It’s pretentious, controversial, and wildly creative and exhilarating, with a killer soundtrack. If you wanted Honey Don’t! to be more like Blood Simple, this is for you.
This article appears in Sep 17-23 2025.
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