Playing the long game Manitoba-shot dystopian tale a bleak, slow-burning trek of metaphors By: Randall King Posted: 5:41 PM CDT Thursday, Sep. 11, 2025

Stephen King started writing his first novel, The Long Walk, in the mid-1960s when he was a freshman in college and while the war in Vietnam slogged on without a sign of light at the end of the tunnel.

The book — published in 1979 under King’s Richard Bachman pseudonym — is now a movie, directed by Francis Lawrence, after King-seasoned directors George Romero (Creepshow) and Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption) tried and failed to get it roadworthy.

Screenwriter JT Mollner’s adaptation of the book — shot in 2024 in various Manitoba locations, including Birds Hill Park — captures the bleak desperation of the era. At times, it echoes Oliver Stone’s Vietnam movie Platoon, with young men making friends and enemies in the pressure cooker of war as their numbers inexorably shrink.

The difference is that in this movie, the young men are at war with their own country.

The premise is that the titular competition is intended as a morale-builder for a diminished and dystopian America. Fifty young men, each representing their home state, are simply required to walk. They will not stop until only one is left.

If their speed falls below three miles an hour, or if they fall down entirely, three times, they get their “tickets,” as promised by the competition’s brutal overseer the Major (Mark Hamill), ticket being code for a bullet in the head.

Lawrence directed the Hunger Games franchise, a similar dystopian story, but thankfully, he jettisons the big-budget production embellishment. (There are no flaming dresses here.)

For example, we’re told the competition is broadcast on televisions across the country, but we never once see people tuned in. For the most part, the only watchers are seen along lonely country roads, and they might as well be mourners.

That leaves emphasis entirely on the characters, chiefly Raymond Garraty (Cooper Hoffman of Licorice Pizza) and Peter McVries (David Jonsson of Industry). They share benign, thoughtful natures and a deep contempt for the competition in which they are partaking.

Their rapport that will attract other competitors and alienate others, especially Gary Barkovitch (Charlie Plummer), a bully whose deadly haranguing of another competitor gets him ostracized by everyone.

They’re all very good performers, especially Plummer, but Hoffman and Jonsson hold the centre of the film. Hoffman has a natural charm, providing much-needed warmth in the chilling premise.

And one would be hard-pressed to recognize the British Jonsson from his earlier role as a childlike android in Alien: Romulus. Playing a much-abused streetwise American with a heart of gold, Jonsson somehow dodges the clichés inherent in the role and humanizes McVries.

Not a lot of Manitobans get on camera, but those who represent behind the scenes include costume designer Heather Neale and make-up department head Doug Morrow.

Manitobans may find it especially poignant that Hoffman is performing on the same geography as his father, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, who filmed his Oscar-winning turn in Capote (2005) here, where those lonely country roads doubled for rural Kansas.

randall.king.arts@gmail.com