The Long Walk (2025)

Score: 4 / 5

It's become somehow fun for people to either adore or detest Stephen King -- especially his adaptations -- and I don't have the slightest interest in those conversations. King is a master of horror fiction, that much has always been clear, and I'm rarely more intrigued than when a new title surfaces. While I've been a longtime personal fan of his work, I'm by no means an expert or even a completionist. Yet. So this novel, published in 1979 under his pseudonym Richard Bachman, was not one I had read before, and I was eager to experience it. Little did I know that it would blow me away.

If you've seen the trailer, or seen the title itself, you already know the plot. A simple concept becomes much more, though, in King's imagination, as he imbues diverse characters with such fascinating psychological quirks that they end up being the story far more than the plot is. His imagined America, here, is bleak and evil, and the characters are cogs in a dystopian machine, lorded over by a totalitarian military regime that feels shockingly close to where we're currently headed. Think something between The Hunger Games and The Handmaid's Tale, and that's the kind of haunting mess you'll have stuck in your head after watching this film.

Which is apt, as it's helmed by Francis Lawrence himself, director of most of the Hunger Games film series (and Constantine, I Am Legend, Water for Elephants, and Red Sparrow). He melds quite well, here, with King's story of adolescent male bonding -- rather typical of his work -- in a somewhat retro version of Americana, set in remote rural Maine. I can only imagine the difficulty with which writer JT Mollner had to grapple in dramatizing this story for the screen, visually monotonous as it is and with a literally set pace of 3mph. Yet Mollner's sheer brilliance in Strange Darling should have prepared me for the psychological thrills he'd deliver here, on the edges of civilization and civility alike. There's a literary sensibility to this film I have trouble identifying, but it has something to do with Steinbeck and Bradbury. And the characters' dialogue is never less than riveting, as it's pretty much all we -- and they -- have to go on. What else can you do while walking endlessly by necessity?

I don't really have much else to say, so forgive the coming non-sequiturs. The actors are all excellent, especially leads Cooper Hoffman (yes, Hoffman) and David Jonsson (making a huge case for leading man stardom, after Alien: Romulus), the latter of which was so charming and charismatic in this film I sometimes had trouble believing he was suffering at all. Talk about literature; Jonsson is the film's Samwise Gamgee. Judy Greer, Charlie Plummer, and Mark Hamill are all grim and suitably entertaining, though none are really given any character depth to feel like high points in the film. The scenes of horror -- and I do mean pure, unadulterated, violent and gross and shocking horror -- truly upset me in this film, perhaps because I didn't expect it of Lawrence. This is a hard R rating, for sure, and even someone too accustomed to such things may find parts of this film difficult to endure. I sure did.

This is going on my list of favorite King adaptations, for sure. It's a somber affair, one rife with elevated ideas and major themes woven with care and compassion for its characters. Depicting a hard world like this can so easily result in flattened character archetypes and forced action; this feels raw and immediate in a way that's difficult to put into words. This is along the lines of The Green Mile or The Shawshank Redemption, Dolores Claiborne, even Stand By Me, in terms of King's work, and I just loved it, despite sweating profusely and weeping loudly during our screening. The film's climax was a tad disappointing to me, but no less satisfying for it, and by the time the credits started, I was a mess. Thankfully, that meant I stayed in the darkened auditorium and heard the original song "Took a Walk" by Shaboozey and Stephen Wilson Jr., which is already my choice for best original song of 2025. What an extraordinary final touch to an already highly successful film.