‘The Long Walk’ review: Brace yourself for the bleakest Stephen King adaptation

The dictionary entry for “bleak” should just be the entirety of Stephen King‘s The Long Walk.

The first novel King ever wrote (although not the first to be published), The Long Walk presents a dystopian America where every year, 100 young men participate in a grueling walk across the country. Fall behind or veer off the road, and they’ll get shot by the soldiers driving alongside them. The last walker standing wins untold riches and a wish the government must fulfill, but can that truly make up for all he’s lost over the course of this death march?

With a concept like that, it’s no surprise that reading The Long Walk mimics the arduous trials its protagonists face. King is relentless in his depiction of the boys’ suffering, and the same goes for The Long Walk‘s film adaptation, directed by Francis Lawrence, who’s helmed every Hunger Games film but the first.

Given Lawrence’s involvement and the government-mandated death games of it all, it’s tempting to draw comparisons between The Long Walk and the Hunger Gamesfranchise. But The Long Walk is a far more pared-back dystopia, trading the pageantry of the Capitol and its elaborate Hunger Games arenas for the empty simplicity of the open road. However, that simplicity proves to be both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it allows Lawrence to hone in on his talented young cast as their characters go through hell in a span of days. But on the other, the simple nature of the walk leaves weak characterization and overly on-the-nose storytelling nowhere to hide.

The Long Walk is bleak to the point of exhausting.

Written by JT Mollner (Strange Darling), The Long Walk makes some changes from King’s novel. The number of walkers is halved to 50, while several characters are cut entirely. The film’s protagonist remains Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman), but the film gives him a more revolutionary reason for participating in the walk than the novel, one that’s tied to his late father’s relationship to the current military regime.

Despite these changes, Mollner and Lawrence remain steadfast in their commitment to the novel’s grimness. Aside from 10 minutes of pre-walk prep and a few quick flashbacks, we’re on the road with the walkers the whole time. For early stages of the walk, you might think you’re just watching high school boys bonding on a cross-country hike. Garraty introduces himself to fellow walkers like Peter McVries (David Jonsson), Hank Olson (Ben Wang), and Arthur Baker (Tut Nyuot). They chat about their families, rib each other about sexual fantasies, and reveal what they’d wish for if they win. But don’t be fooled by their banter.

Every so often, the film breaks up its long walk and talks to remind viewers — and the walkers — that this is do or die. Participants get brutally shot, and from the film’s first, jaw-shattering kill, Lawrence leaves nothing up to the imagination. At first, the gore is shocking, but as The Long Walk trudges on, the walkers’ deaths become a sick, demoralizing routine.

The pattern of deaths risks getting monotonous, but Lawrence leans heavily on the psychological horror of the walk as much as he does on its physical effects. Forget violence: The dread that seeps in as a walker realizes his body is failing him proves far more impactful than any gunshot. After almost two hours of being immersed in this string of deaths, you may find yourself begging, “Enough already!” The Long Walk, however, does not let up, trapping you in a never-ending nightmare of bloodied feet and fraying minds.

The Long Walk‘s storytelling can be frustratingly thin.

Mark Hamill in “The Long Walk.”
Credit: Murray Close / Lionsgate

The Long Walk cannot subsist on brutality alone, though. And unfortunately, much of what surrounds it fails to make a mark.

Aside from its core four of Garraty, McVries, Olson, and Baker, The Long Walk‘s characters are paper-thin. Wild card Gary Barkovitch (Charlie Plummer) is a stereotypical King bully on the verge of snapping. Curly (Roman Griffin Davis) is young, Rank (Daymon Wrightly) is anxious, Collie (Joshua Odjick) is stoic. There’s not much more to them than those descriptors, and while that flatness may come with the territory of writing a film with 50 characters (49 of whom are marked for death), it also threatens to turn the boys into nothing but the cannon fodder the soldiers who gun them down believe them to be.

Where The Long Walk‘s wider ensemble is underdeveloped, elements of its messaging about its dystopian America tend to be over the top. Periodically, the authoritarian leader known simply as the Major (Mark Hamill) rolls up on his truck to rasp encouraging speeches. Thanks to the walkers’ work ethic, he claims, “we will be #1 in the world again!”

The Trumpian allusion rings chillingly true in the current political climate, but there’s not much else to the Major beyond that. His speeches, like the walkers’ deaths, become repetitive to the point of numbing.

The same thinness plagues the world of The Long Walk itself. Rolling wheat fields and deserted townscapes do a nice job building out the desolate, economically depleted America of the film. Yet each glimpse of the people who inhabit these landscapes feels less like organic world-building and more like immaculately staged, on-the-nose portrayals of poverty. A man and his daughter perched on a tractor feel less like eerie spectators than they do an awkward attempt at an “American Gothic” redux. One walker jokes that all that they’re missing is a pitchfork, but the artificiality of the scene dilutes the dystopian reality of the film.

David Jonsson, Cooper Hoffman, and the cast of The Long Walk shine.

Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson in “The Long Walk.”
Credit: Murray Close / Lionsgate

The Long Walk‘s issues would likely feel even more glaring if it wasn’t for the talents of its cast, who quickly gel as brothers-in-arms on their march towards the end. Hoffman makes for a naturally sympathetic lead, especially in scenes when he encourages other walkers to keep going. Wang brings much-needed humor to The Long Walk‘s relentlessly dark proceedings, yet it’s his descent into hopelessness that truly sticks with you.

But it’s Jonsson — also the highlight of 2024’s Alien: Romulus— who steals the show as McVries. An ever-charismatic optimist who’s fiercely protective of Garraty throughout the walk, Jonsson brightens every inch of the screen in a turn that should cement his star status. Together, he and Hoffman’s dynamic as strangers-turned-fast friends proves to be the very human heart of The Long Walk. (While the film further explores the novel’s queer subtext, it probably could have done without all the casual homophobia.) As dark and dour as The Long Walk is, the ways Garraty and McVries find hope in each other prove to be the light we need to see us through.

The Long Walk is now in theaters.