Young-adult dystopia movies? This is one of the bleakest I’ve seen

The Long Walk
★★★½
MA. 107 minutes

Hollywood in the 21st century has given us countless young-adult dystopias, but I can’t recall seeing a bleaker example of the genre than The Long Walk, directed by Francis Lawrence, also responsible for the later Hunger Games films.

The Long Walk: earnest and gruesome.Credit: Murray Close/Lionsgate

This is meant as a compliment. Lawrence and screenwriter JT Mollner (Strange Darling) have gone back to one of the founding examples of the genre, an early novel by Stephen King, published under a pen name in 1979 but written more than a decade earlier, when the author was a student fearful of being called up to fight in the Vietnam War.

That anxiety underlies the simple premise of the story, set in an alternate America even more troubled than the real one: 50 youths sign on to take part in a partly televised competition where they walk along a rural highway until only one of them is left standing.

The rules prohibit them from pausing more than briefly, straying off the beaten track, or slowing their speed below three miles an hour – and when they’re unable to go any further, the soldiers driving alongside them simply shoot them down.

Wisely, the filmmakers haven’t attempted to update the material – or not overtly. The costumes evoke the 1970s without being too specific, and the Walk remains an all-male event, though the excellent cast is more racially diverse than what King may have seen originally in his mind’s eye.

Nor are there any pop-culture references more contemporary than Candid Camera, unless the casting of Mark Hamill as the officer overseeing this infernal ritual amounts to a reference in itself (he does also hint that his goal is to make America great again – but not precisely in those words).

The deaths are far more gruesome than in the relatively tame Hunger Games films, something King himself reportedly insisted on as an executive producer. But the tone is earnest rather than gleefully cynical. The real substance of the film is in the profane yet increasingly philosophical exchanges between those left standing, especially the rebellious protagonist, Raymond Garrity (Cooper Hoffman), and his fatalistic friend, Peter McVries (David Jonsson).

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Hoffman has done only a couple of movies since 2021, when he starred as a precocious teenage wheeler-dealer in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza. But if The Long Walk is any indication, we can expect a lot more from him as an actor capable of balancing contradictions: here again he’s playing a sensitive extrovert, genuinely jovial but also watching himself from a distance, with depths of pain he’s determined to keep hidden.

If anything, he’s too complicated a presence for the movie, which remains a reasonably straightforward fable, and which might have worked best as a pure ensemble piece rather than singling out one character as the hero.

Still, for a large-scale Hollywood production The Long Walk is remarkably uncompromised – and whatever may have changed since the 1960s – its allegorical vision of a game set up to be all but unwinnable feels all too likely to resonate with kids today.

The Long Walk is in cinemas from Thursday

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