The Long Walk (2025)
★★½ — The Long Walk (2025)
There's a version of The Long Walk that genuinely disturbs you, that gets under your skin and stays there. A near-future authoritarian state. Teenage boys forced to march without stopping until only one survives. The premise is right there, loaded with potential for psychological horror, moral collapse, slow-burn dread. I sat down hoping for something that would make me squirm. What I got instead was a film that trudges along almost as listlessly as its characters.
The most obvious reference point is Battle Royale, and the film clearly knows it. You can feel the influence hanging over every scene, and by extension the whole dystopian-competition subgenre that Battle Royale helped inspire. The Hunger Games, Squid Game, and a dozen others have all ploughed this same ground. The problem isn't that The Long Walk borrows from that tradition. It's that it brings almost nothing new to it. No fresh angle on state control or conformity, no surprising structural choice, no image or moment that feels like it belongs to this film and this film alone. If you've spent any time with the genre, you'll see every beat coming from a considerable distance.
The script is the core of the issue. It's built almost entirely on an "and then, and then, and then" logic: a boy falls behind, there's a confrontation, someone is eliminated, the march continues. Repeat. There's no real accumulation of tension, no sense that the story is building toward anything with meaning. It just moves forward because films have to move forward. The central protagonist carries most of the weight and the film can't quite make him work. His internal struggle is announced rather than dramatised. We're told he's suffering, we watch him suffer, but we're never truly inside it. That's a significant problem when the whole point of a story like this is to make you feel the harrowing grind from the inside.
The performances don't help. The young cast are working hard, but the results are uneven at best. Most of them land somewhere between wooden stoicism and melodramatic urgency, and neither register feels authentic to the world the film is trying to build. With so little character work in the script, the actors haven't got much to hold onto, and it shows. By the time yet another boy collapses or turns on his neighbour, the emotional impact has long since been worn flat by repetition.
Visually, the film goes for desaturated and rain-soaked, which is a reasonable enough choice for this kind of material. Bleak realism. I get it. But it commits to that palette so relentlessly, without any real variation or visual invention, that it stops feeling like an atmosphere and starts feeling like a limitation. Compare it to something like Mad Max: Fury Road, which uses a similarly harsh, stripped-back world but finds extraordinary visual language within it. The Long Walk doesn't have that. It mistakes drabness for grit.
I've reviewed The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013) on here, and whatever criticisms you might level at that franchise, it understood something crucial: you have to make the audience care desperately about who survives. Catching Fire earns its tension because it earns its characters first. The Long Walk never quite gets there. The eliminations blur into one another because the boys feel like interchangeable pieces rather than people.
None of this makes The Long Walk outright bad. It's competently made in a functional sense. The premise is solid enough that a few scenes do land, flickering with the kind of unease the whole film should've been generating. There are bones here that could have supported something genuinely potent. But vision, character work and narrative ingenuity are three things this film needed in abundance, and it's running short on all of them.
Two and a half stars. A missed opportunity rather than a disaster, which in some ways is the more frustrating result. A disaster at least has personality. This one just keeps walking.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2025 | Watched: 2026-05-10
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: HBO Max Amazon Channel · HBO Max · Starz Apple TV channel
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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