Review: ‘The Long Walk’ is the best Stephen King adaptation in years
2025 / Dir. Francis Lawrence
☆ 4/5
Watch if you like: Stand By Me, but instead of growing apart as they got older they were gunned down by the government.
Don’t let the involvement of longtime Hunger Games series director Francis Lawrence fool you: The Long Walk is not an attempt to bring back the 2010s trend of dystopian teen films. One of the best Stephen King adaptations in years, if not decades, The Long Walk is a thrilling, devastating depiction of a group of young men being systematically broken down by a fascist system trying to find the will to go on for just one more mile.
As The Long Walk begins, we learn a war has left the country destitute. Each year, young men across the country volunteer for the titular walk to win a small fortune and one wish granted by The Major (Mark Hammill), a platitude-spewing, empty authority figure. The “contestants” have to maintain a speed of three miles per hour day and night without breaks. If they can’t, after a series of warnings, they’re shot in the head by one of the soldiers riding alongside the walkers until only one boy remains.
There are no mutant creatures, booby traps, or teenage love triangles—it’s literally walk or die. That simplicity might not sound riveting on paper, but it creates tension and terror out of little things we take for granted. Getting a cramp, having to stop to tie a shoe, and a steep hill after a long day all become life-or-death situations. The stakes become higher, and the deaths increasingly devastating and unbearable as the men become more exhausted yet also bond closer together.
Cooper Hoffman leads the cast as Raymond Garraty in his biggest role since his surprisingly fun debut in Licorice Pizza. Here he shows his range, and the makings of a future star, in a much more subdued role as a good-natured young man quietly seething with rage and trauma from growing up under an oppressive government. He forms a friendship and partnership with Peter McVries, whose literal scars on his body show past wounds but shows Garraty through his words and actions that there’s another way, even under fascism.
McVries is played by David Jonsson who, like Hoffman, is another actor to watch, delivering versatile, compelling roles in Industry and most recently as the android Andy in Alien: Romulus. His character McVries is unfortunately not given equal treatment as Garraty, which is one of the film’s few missteps, but through his sheer presence makes the role a powerful one. The growing relationship between Garraty and McVries is the beating heart of the film and recalls the best parts of the friendship between Andy Dufresne and Red in The Shawshank Redemption.
The rest of the cast is filled with many other compelling young actors, some more developed than others, but the central characters all make an impact even if we just learn about their main motivation for joining the walk. The journey they make is clearly intended to remind us of Stand By Me, another of the great Stephen King adaptations, and J.T. Mollner’s (Strange Darling) script nails the way young men communicate and bond with each other.
Even in a film that requires a bit more dialogue than would probably make sense for a bunch of guys having to conserve their energy or die, how they all interact feels very natural. The way the film is photographed adds to this. Scenes are cleverly constructed with walkers moving in and out of conversations. There’s not an effort to make too many cuts or overly flashy shots—the material speaks for itself. Which isn’t to say the film doesn’t have a certain haunted beauty to it as the cast walks through desolate rural countryside and forgotten rust belt-looking towns. This structure is so strong, the couple times we leave it for a brief dream sequence and flashback feel awkward and misplaced.
The book was written by Stephen King when he was in college, nearly the same age as the characters, and could easily be seen as a metaphor for the Vietnam War draft. The film feels equally relevant today. The Long Walk is a clear rebuke to a faux-capitalist American dream where a underclass is chewed up and spit out in the false hope they each will make it to the finish line. It’s not far-fetched to view the film as a reaction to the current state of masculinity with the “boys” natural tendency to create friendship, brotherhood, and a supportive, if often immature, community. That natural thrust goes up against a contrived system where literally only one can be the alpha figure and an arbitrary authority figure yells “encouraging” slogans about being a man.
On the surface, the premise of The Long Walk may be dismissed as “male Hunger Games”, but what it offers viewers is a relevant and raw look at living under a pointlessly cruel system that’s not far removed from what we see on the news every day. And more importantly: that there’s a way to live in these dark times without losing your humanity too.