The Long Walk

The Long Walk is an adaptation of Stephen King's novel. It is the first novel written by the writer in 1966-67, while he was a student, in the midst of the Vietnam War. The novel was published in 1979 under the name Richard Bachmann. The action takes place in the near future. Every year, the Long Walk is held: one hundred young volunteers begin a march across the United States, which has become a totalitarian country. Under the authority of a "Commander," supervised by soldiers, they must walk day and night, without stopping, without falling below a speed of 3 miles/hour. If the marcher stops, they are executed after three warnings. The last one is declared the winner. They receive a very large sum of money as well as the "Prize," which can be anything they wish. The novel begins in a lighthearted atmosphere before gradually transforming into an inevitable descent into darkness.

The adaptation is directed by Francis Lawrence, who knows how to direct survival and dystopian stories, having done The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Mockingjay. The challenge is to visually recreate this novel, which is narrated from the perspective of Ray Garraty. Francis Lawrence wanted to write this adaptation with filmmaker and former actor JT Mollner (Strange Darling). Here, there is no voiceover. The viewer follows the characters in their evolution. The choice not to water down the novel gives the film a brutality, faithful to the novel. The tension, violence, and atrocity of the march are preserved.

The direction captures the exhaustion, psychological horror, and physical horror without resorting to gratuitous violence. The film was shot in chronological order. As the relentless mechanic of the March recurs throughout the film, the viewer is plunged into this situation from which there is no possible escape. The adaptation questions the value of life, sacrifice, survival, camaraderie, and media voyeurism (the March is broadcast on television). The film is thus anchored in a broader reflection, but it doesn't make anything explicit: it's up to each viewer to make their own interpretation.

The film relies heavily on the performances of its young actors. They are all believable, as they navigate this journey toward death, moving from fear to terror, from loneliness to solidarity, from hope to despair, even madness. Cooper Hoffman (Licorize Pizza) is believable in the lead role of Ray Garraty. David Jonsson (Alien: Romulus) is breathtaking as Peter McVries. Mark Hamill, unrecognizable under dark glasses and a cap, plays the Major, a chilling character against type.

This review is guaranteed spoiler-free. The adaptation altered some characters, their motivations, and the novel's ending. The film may seem less powerful than the book. However, the adaptation is successful, challenging, and best reserved for fans of dark dystopias.

The Long Walk
Directed by Francis Lawrence
Written by JT Mollner
Based on The Long Walk by Stephen King
Produced by Roy Lee, Steven Schneider, Francis Lawrence, Cameron MacConomy
Starring Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Garrett Wareing, Tut Nyuot, Charlie Plummer, Ben Wang, Roman, Griffin Davis, Joshua Odjick, Judy Greer, Mark Hamill
Cinematography: Jo Willems
Edited by Mark Yoshikawa
Music by Jeremiah Fraites
Production companies: Vertigo Entertainment, Lionsgate, Newline Cinema
Distributed by Lionsgate (United States), Metropolitan FilmExport (France)
Release date: September 12, 2025 (United States), October 1, 2025 (France)
Running time: 108 minutes

Seen on September 23, 2025 at the Metropolitan Theater

Sabine's Mark:

For Sylvain and Laurent, life is a long endurance walk.

Francis Lawrence approaches The Long Walk like a filmmaker who deliberately eliminates all distractions until all that remains is the initial premise, the road, and the characters. The result is a studio film that combines the austerity of an independent film with the audacity of a protest film, a march that also serves as an autopsy: that of a country's myths, a generation's prospects, and entertainment's appetite for suffering. From the outset, the film is uncompromising: even before the title appears, a boy is executed at point-blank range for slowing down the pace, an image that immediately sets out the rules and the price to be paid. This strategy could be interpreted as mere shock value, but under JT Mollner's disciplined adaptation, it becomes a thesis, returning in different forms as the miles accumulate and the boys' bodies and convictions wear thin. Where other tales of deadly games expand outward to become spectacular, The Long Walk contracts inward; the television audience is largely invisible, the pomp of the regime is toned down, and the road is the whole world. This narrowing is the film's risky gamble and its strength: by refusing to show decadence at the Capitol or rebellion in the districts, Francis Lawrence forces you to study faces, mannerisms, and micro-alliances as you would study the weather if you no longer had shelter.

At the heart of the film is the duo formed by Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson, whose complicity sets the pace of the film as surely as the boys' metronomic steps. Ray Garraty, played by Cooper Hoffman, carries a personal mission that the film reveals in clever, unadorned fragments—flashbacks that are less detours than pressure points—while Peter McVries, played by David Jonsson, moves through the frame with the confidence of someone who has seen a thousand battles, inspiring trust and encouraging confessions. The casting is elegant: Cooper Hoffman plays forward, pushing toward the next choice, the next risk; David Jonsson plays outward, caring for others, gathering their stories and insisting on dignity even when the rules demand indifference. Around them, the ensemble refuses to become archetypes, even when the situation could have engulfed them: Hank Olson, played by Ben Wang, uses humor as a weapon to manage pain; Stebbins, played by Garrett Wareing, keeps his advice to himself like a quarterback saving his last drive;

Barkovitch, played by Charlie Plummer, stirs up the group with a provocative bravado that feels less like malice than misdirected terror; Tut Nyuot gives Arthur Baker a gentleness that the film deliberately does not shield; Collie, played by Joshua Odjick, observes too much and sleeps too little.  If The Long Walk works as a sustained film, it's because these young actors transform the walk into a dozen distinct forms of storytelling: how you clench your jaw, how you prefer one shoe over another, how you support a friend without stealing a step from them. Visually, Jo Willems films like a documentary filmmaker a ritual we've always known but have stopped naming.

The palette is desaturated without mannerism, as if color itself were a luxury that the state had made inaccessible through taxation; the camera constantly pulls back along the center line, letting the boys advance as if they were pushing us back mile after mile. This choice may seem monotonous on paper, but in practice it becomes a diagnostic tool. We begin to read their postures as we would read the results of a laboratory analysis. A slight drop in the shoulder means dehydration. A wandering gaze means sleep is looming. A foot that is too flat announces the next warning even before the sergeant's megaphone does. The film punctuates this clinical and imperturbable gaze with touches of grotesque realism: a mist of blood, a sock blackened by accumulated liquid, a body that loses its dignity because the rules allow no respite. The film makes no secret of its rating, but violence is not a mere accompaniment; it is a process, imposed by anonymous soldiers and narrated by the regime's mascot, the Major played by Mark Hamill, whose aviator glasses and slogans are less a character trait than an operating system. Mark Hamill is not so much seeking nuance as the preferred tone of power: performative certainty. His words of encouragement sound like taunts, and when the boys finally chant slogans against him, his approval spoils the moment: this machine devours rebellion and calls it fuel.

The film's politics are legible by design. Stephen King wrote The Long Walk while America was calling its sons to arms; Francis Lawrence and JT Mollner keep the ghost of Vietnam in the frame while emphasizing work, productivity, and the myth of labor that tells the poor that their exhaustion is a test of patriotism. In this timeline, the Walk would increase GDP; in ours, the rhetoric is less explicit, but the compromise is similar. What's clever is how the film dramatizes consent as conditioning. Everyone is a volunteer, sure, but everyone has been conditioned since birth to dream of a wish that justifies the odds. A cruel little note: the film reduces the initial speed from 4 mph to 3 mph, an adjustment that seems humane until you realize how much more plausible the lower figure makes the premise. This is how systems sell exploitation, promising accessibility while obscuring the attrition curve. The advertising projection on the treadmill—with the audience forced to keep running at 3 mph or lose their seats—was a brazen PR stunt, but it also serves as an accidental critique: even our marketing reproduces the labor relations that history condemns. The film sees this and deliberately refrains from catharsis. When “America the Beautiful” finally plays, the signal does not redeem; it accuses, challenging you to recognize an anthem that has been repurposed as a marching cadence.

As an adaptation, it is also a case study in subtraction. JT Mollner reduces Stephen King's inner spirals and hormonal detours, replaces endless digressions with elastic conversations, and, most importantly, refocuses the emotional arc on reciprocity rather than self-mythification. This softens certain aspects (some will regret the delirious subjectivity of the book), but clarifies the intention: the film is less about what the boys think of themselves than what they do for each other when the rules demand the opposite. The “musketeers” dynamic never turns into a cliché, because the film refuses to promise safety; loyalty pushes back against fate, it does not erase it. We feel this in the staging: hands passing a water bottle at top speed, a shoulder helping to keep balance for the ten seconds allowed, a warning given not to save oneself but to save one's friend... Small conspiracies of kindness in a game rigged to criminalize kindness. By the time only a handful remain, the film has surreptitiously introduced its most subversive idea: solidarity is both a tactic and an afterlife. The boys will die as individuals; they have already lived as a plurality.

If there is a downside to report, it is inherent in the concept itself. Even with flawless performances, walking can only be varied in a few ways, and certain organizational choices—an overreliance at times on the same frontal tracking shot, the repetition of the motif of execution in the background—risk flattening new developments into familiar rhythms. Yet the film generally avoids this trap by letting the characters' movements do what the camera movements cannot. Cooper Hoffman modulates Ray's gait, shifting from a brutal determination to a more supple, almost attentive gait learned from David Jonsson; Ben Wang's speech shortens syllable by syllable as oxygen deprivation sets in; Garrett Wareing's pride collapses inwardly until it appears more like a survival tic than a display of menace. Even Judy Greer, in two brief scenes, embodies the film's common grief: that of a mother who supports a system she despises because love cannot afford one last argument. In a film that eschews grand gestures, these are the grand gestures.

The intertext is rich but never parasitic. We sense Koushun Takami and Suzanne Collins in the dialogue, and Sydney Pollack's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? haunts the corners like a ghostly coach. The difference is that The Long Walk rejects the comfort of an arena with villains who can be booed in their glittery costumes. The cruelty here is municipal—an ordinance cloaked in rhetoric about the work ethic—and that's why the film's pared-down aesthetic hurts. If it looks like a washed-out photograph from the 1970s, it's not nostalgia; it's a reminder that the policies we now call unthinkable once had fonts and headers. Francis Lawrence's refusal to construct a world beyond what the boys can see is a moral stance: explanation can become excuse. Better to keep us on the asphalt, where doctrine is just another word for rules shouted through a megaphone while a teenager gets dirty in front of the camera because no breaks are allowed.

What ultimately remains are not the gunshots, but the small courtesies that the film treats as sacred: the way McVries, played by David Jonsson, collects names like relics; the calm in Cooper Hoffman's eyes when he realizes that leadership without tenderness is just another form of Major; the moment when Charlie Plummer goes from barking to begging and no one taunts him because mercy has taken precedence over competition; the tired, almost embarrassed smile when a boy realizes he is supported by three others who will not let him down under their watch. The film's ending leans more toward Hollywood than Stephen King's brutal ambiguity, but if we look beyond the staging, the prognosis is no more cheerful: systems don't collapse because a survivor makes a wish. If there is hope here, it is gritty and tenacious, measured not in victories but in refusals: refusal of dehumanization, refusal of the lie that success requires the execution of others, refusal of the idea that walking in line is synonymous with moving forward. It is this silent rebellion that The Long Walk honors. It is not triumphant. It is not orderly. It is human, and in a landscape designed to pulverize that word, humanity is a treasur

The Long Walk
Directed by Francis Lawrence
Written by JT Mollner
Based on The Long Walk by Stephen King
Produced by Roy Lee, Steven Schneider, Francis Lawrence, Cameron MacConomy
Starring Cooper Hoffman, David Jonssonn, Garrett Wareing, Tut Nyuot, Charlie Plummer, Ben Wang, Roman, Griffin Davis, Joshua Odjick, Judy Greer, Mark Hamill
Cinematography: Jo Willems
Edited by Mark Yoshikawa
Music by Jeremiah Fraites
Production companies: Vertigo Entertainment, About:Blank
Distributed by Lionsgate (United States), Metropolitan FilmExport (France)
Release date: September 12, 2025 (United States), October 1, 2025 (France)
Running time: 108 minutes

Seen on October 1, 2025 at the Gaumont Disney Village, Theater 10, seat B19

Mulder's Mark: