The Long Walk

The Long Walk might give you motion sickness.

In what is, ostensibly, the next YA craze after The Hunger Games (even using the same director Francis Lawrence), The Maze Runner et al., we instead get a distinctly one-off, Squid Game-esque, brutal and violent thriller.

Based on an early Stephen King novel, The Long Walk is set in a dystopian future where a yearly contest (like the aforementioned Hunger Games) is broadcast on national American television.

In it, fifty young men (who ‘volunteer’) have to simply walk until only one remains.

It’s quite the set up and every possible thought you might have as to how that could go is pretty much depicted.

Sticking rigidly to the group as they endlessly march, this is a bleak and oppressive film, lifted by the slow camaraderie that builds among the boys and the often funny banter and dialogue they share.

Avoiding flashbacks almost entirely (except for one short one which is key for the plot) works brilliantly to sustain the intensity and the brutality.

Perhaps a few cutaways to the cityscapes of this ‘post-war’ US to see the citizens watching the contest could have been interesting but it seems the decision was made to not distract from the action.

It is hard-hitting and every death is sickening, loud and often violent. Not one for the squeamish.

Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson are our two main protagonists and both are incredibly rounded, sympathetic and believable characters performed impeccably.

Mark Hammill is the mysterious ‘Major’ in charge of proceedings and he’s shouty and menacing, albeit not onscreen all that often.

Whilst it probably goes the way you largely expect, you still feel the ramifications of each death.

It always takes great skill to introduce and round off characters that the audience knows won’t make the end of the film and, like Squid Game and The Hunger Games before it, this does that extremely well.

Whilst it lacks the replay value of those forebears, it’s an immensely watchable, tense and hard-hitting thriller with some obvious but relevant messages about the state of the world.

It balances that sickening depiction of its broken dystopia with equally disturbing events and the constant motion of the camera and constant motion of the characters also leads to the general feeling of unease.

The motion sickness serves to underline its political messaging and the film will certainly make you feel something, even if that is just queasy.

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