YNOT at the Movies

Bleak, chilling, and merciless, "The Long Walk" (USA 2025 | 108 min.) makes the road itself into a graveyard, and makes the journey as harrowing for the audience as for the boys. The film is director Francis Lawrence's adaptation of Stephen King's first-written novel, a dystopian story King penned in the shadow of the Vietnam War, when American teenagers were drafted by lottery to die on the battlefield. Here, the battleground is a bleak stretch of highway, and the war is replaced by a state-sanctioned endurance contest designed to grind fifty boys down to one lone survivor.

The rules are cruelly simple: keep walking at three miles per hour, no stops, no rest, no mercy. Fall behind and receive three warnings before instant execution. Among the walkers, Ray #47 (Cooper Hoffman), an empathetic, natural leader, becomes the quiet center of the story, while Peter #23 (David Jonsson), charismatic and confident, emerges as his closest ally and eventual rival. Their bond, forged in exhaustion and terror, gives the film its emotional core. Others drift in and out of focus—Stebbins #38 (Garrett Wareing), the so-called Superman fitness fanatic; Arthur #6 (Tut Nyuot), a gentle dreamer who longs to travel to the moon; Gary #5 (Charlie Plummer), a taunting agitator who masks insecurity with cruelty; Hank #46 (Ben Wang), the street-smart, superstitious talker who joins Ray, Peter, and Arthur as part of "the Four Musketeers"; Curly #7 (Roman Griffin Davis), the youngest participant, whose aching legs remind us of the boys' supposed adolescence; and Collie #48 (Joshua Odjick), an Indigenous participant with a tough look and deep conviction. Over them all looms The Major (Mark Hamill), an authoritarian true believer in dark sunglasses, meting out slogans and death with equal detachment.

Watching the film feels like walking it: grim, punishing, and utterly exhausting. Director Francis Lawrence stages the dystopian story as the simplest, most brutal concept—step after step toward annihilation. The inevitability of the outcome doesn't dull its impact. Even if we know only one boy will remain, the gradual attrition, the blistered feet and hollow eyes, leave us shaken. Yet the plausibility falters: could anyone really march nonstop for five days and more than 300 miles? The film asks us to accept the impossible as allegory, and when viewed as a reflection of war, conscription, and how young lives are treated as expendable, it works with chilling clarity.

The casting, however, is less convincing. The actors bring intensity and gravitas, but they look too old for roles that should be unbearably raw, unformed teenagers. Had younger faces been chosen, the horror might have felt even sharper. As it stands, Ray and Peter dominate the screen time while most others remain lightly sketched, and the emotional investment narrows accordingly.

Still, the film grips and unsettles in equal measure. It's heavy, haunting, and often hard to watch, a slow march into despair that channels the same unease Stephen King captured nearly half a century ago. Like the boys doomed to keep walking, the audience emerges drained, shaken, and grimly aware that survival is no victory at all.

"The Long Walk" opens in theaters on Friday, September 12, 2025.