‘The Long Walk’ Review: Friendship at the Edge of a Totalitarian Hell

A metaphor in perpetual motion, The Long Walk is a strange film in terms of form yet surprisingly traditional in its dramatic beats. As its title suggests, it’s simple and blunt — a movie that works better as an idea than as a fully realized piece of cinema. Over 108 minutes, this adaptation of the 1979 Stephen King novel published under the Richard Bachman pseudonym becomes a drama with hints of alternate reality, staging in graphic terms what it means to live under a totalitarian system.

Its premise echoes a lineage that goes back to The Most Dangerous Game (1932) and continues in different shapes through Battle Royale, The Hunger Games, and even the recent series Squid Game. In all these stories, a group of people voluntarily enter a sadistic competition knowing that only one will survive and the rest will die trying. The concept can be used as a metaphor for life under savage capitalism, but here — as in The Hunger Games — it becomes a parable about survival and the possibility of rebellion against a brutal, repressive state. And that, today, feels very close to reality.

It’s no coincidence that both this film and the Suzanne Collins adaptations foreground their dystopian elements: they’re directed by the same filmmaker, Francis Lawrence. The Long Walk streamlines the concept even further, going straight to the heart of the matter. Everything unfolds in an America without a clearly defined era or realistic logic. It could be the present or the recent past; the film refuses to say. The country is emerging from a war, and you can feel its economic depression everywhere. In an attempt to “lift people’s spirits” — only in this context could such an event be seen as uplifting — the government organizes the titular long walk, a supposedly cheerful competition that is anything but.

In reality, it’s a contest among the 50 states, each represented by a young man willing to risk his life for the prize, despite knowing that defeat means death. The rules are simple: walk along a highway without stopping to sleep, eat, or relieve yourself, at a constant speed of three miles per hour, until your body gives out. Anyone who slows down three times in a single day and can’t keep the pace is immediately executed by the armed soldiers patrolling the route — a squad led by a cynical commander played by none other than Mark Hamill. If a walker makes it through the day, his warnings reset and he gets another three chances. It’s a test of endurance: push on, survive the heat, the hunger, the injuries, the unraveling mind — because stopping means getting your brains blown out.

Cooper Hoffman plays Ray Garraty, Walker #47 and the only one we get to know outside the march. Like most of his fellow competitors, he enters the race out of economic necessity, carrying a personal trauma that slowly comes into focus. His mother (Judy Greer) watches him leave with dread — she knows his odds are one in fifty — and soon Ray joins a group of boys with similar pressures but different backgrounds and personalities. It’s a cross-section of the country, representing multiple states, social classes, races, and temperaments. In that sense, JT Mollner’s script isn’t far from the structure of war movies, with their platoons of mismatched comrades facing danger together.

The camera moves steadily forward — but looking backward — following Ray, Peter McVries (David Jonsson), Gary Barkovitch (Charlie Plummer), Billy Stebbins (Garrett Wareing), Art Baker (Tut Nyuot), and Hank Olson (Ben Wang), among others, as they walk, befriend each other, argue, feel the physical toll, and witness the brutal eliminations whenever someone falters. The film rarely leaves the highway or its fixed rhythm, except for a few flashbacks, and Lawrence embraces the challenge of building a narrative that risks becoming repetitive both visually and dramatically. The long walk itself becomes the movie’s engine — its version of “the game of life.” The film lives and dies in the relationships between the boys and their attempts, however small, to avoid the almost certain death awaiting them.

King’s novel — and this adaptation — are built on a central idea: to show, vividly, how a society will surrender itself for the scraps offered by those in power, convinced that the prize will solve everything. During the exhausting journey, the boys realize that their so-called competitors don’t have to be rivals or enemies; they can be allies, even friends. Small eruptions of rebellion emerge — not all of them successful.

What The Long Walk adds, and what makes it slightly more hopeful than similar survival-game stories, is its insistence on camaraderie. Aside from a few tense moments, the walkers rarely split into warring factions. Instead, friendship, empathy, and solidarity hold them together throughout the brutal, draining march. Even if the outcomes are just as terrible, that collective spirit — that fragile sense of unity amid oppression — is the most hopeful thing the film offers.