The task is simple, walk or die. The Long Walk is the latest, and long-anticipated, adaptation of a work from pop-literature’s master of horror, Stephen King. A dystopian thriller that follows 50 boys joining a militaristic contest where they must all walk at a rigid speed and a constant rate until only one is left alive, The Long Walk is one of King’s most unrelenting works. Finally brought to the screen after many decades on the page, the film is every bit as harrowing, politically timely, and gutting.
A Story Decades In The Making
Although King shot into literary stardom with his debut novel, Carrie, accompanied by Brian De Palma’s film adaptation in 1976, The Long Walk actually predates that book. King wrote it in the late 1960s while at University of Maine. The Long Walk was published in 1979 under a pseudonym, but later joined King’s bibliography proper in anthologies and standalone paperback additions.
The book found a perfect match of material and director with Francis Lawrence, who found major success at Lionsgate directing the strongest films in the Hunger Games franchise. Lawrence’s work on those films, especially Catching Fire and the recent prequel, A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes proved he could realize this kind of story, but King’s is much darker, demanding a more relentless approach.
Francis Lawrence Brings His Hunger Games Edge
Lawrence, who directed Philip Seymour Hoffman in the Hunger Games sequels, now directs his son, Cooper Hoffman, in the starring role as Ray Garraty. Hoffman is joined by David Jonsson, who was a standout in Alien: Romulus and even more magnetic here as Peter McVries. Garraty and McVries are central to the emotional core of King’s story, and their relationship is every bit as heart-wrenching and dynamic and developed here. Hoffman delivers as a morally confused and complicated character who is reshaped as his motivations become clear, and Jonsson effortlessly balances bringing an electrifying charisma throughout while also carrying the bulk of the emotional burden in the final stretch.
As the movie begins, you might feel a bit restless. We jump right into the walk with no time to establish what is truly at stake, and the tipping point is stretched out about as far as it could be without the audience starting to question, “how could watching 50 people walk for 100 minutes make for an interesting movie?” But once the first ticket is punched, accompanied by a late title-card drop, the film finds a new gear that sustains until the bitter end.
As a work of adaptation, The Long Walk is faithful to the heart of King’s story. Concessions are made for the sake of streamlining the narrative, like shortening the time between warnings to ten seconds, or the number of walkers from 100 to 50, but the film is every bit as emotionally raw, brutal, and bleak. There are other omissions from the text that leave the story in a more grounded place, while the novel had a more existentialist throughline that occasionally leaned into the surreal.
From Vietnam To Modern America: Political Resonance
King’s book was written in the midst of a dark time in American history. Young men were thrust into a world of bloodshed and death that accompanied our involvement in the Vietnam war. The walk could stand in for a televised form of the draft, where the unlucky few were carted away to die for a reason that they did not truly understand. In 2025, the militarization is still intact, but the imagery evokes feelings of a more domestic kind; the everyday status quo of gun violence in America, the willful cognitive dissonance of our country acting as if we have no choice but to keep letting children stare down the barrel of an assault rifle.
The violence is shocking. After the earliest tickets are punched, McVries remarks to Garraty that he hopes it gets easier as they go on. Garraty replies along the lines of “That’s what I’m afraid of.” But in The Long Walk, it never gets easier. As the crowd is cut down, the relationships between the boys continue to grow, as we likewise grow closer to each character. Every warning sustains the tension as the few we get to know well arrive closer to their end. As we crawl hopelessly to the finish line, the bitter reality is fully set in that no punches will be pulled. The ending is a bold, risky play that takes a few drastic creative liberties by diverting from King’s story, but it underlines exactly the same point. There is no room for the saccharine here, it is a cold and unforgiving environment that deserves no real levity because that would be letting us off the hook too easy.
The Long Walk is written for the moment, despite its source being so many decades old. While it is the earliest story King ever wrote, its harsh attitude toward the American political status quo has not aged a day, making for an important and urgent thriller for our times. The cast delivers on making your heart break for these boys, and Jonsson underlines that he is a rising star to watch with one of the strongest screen performances of the year. Lawrence constructed a simple and cutthroat vision of King’s story, with claustrophobic closeups and colorless environments that reflect the cruel world suffocating every square-inch of its narrative. It is not easy to stomach, but it shouldn’t be, and that is what makes this King adaptation more than worth your time.
8 out of 10
The Long Walk is in theaters now.
This article appears in Sep 1-30, 2025.