There’s a particular kind of dread that doesn’t arrive with violence or spectacle. It arrives with rhythm. Footsteps. Repetition. The grinding of will against structure. "The Long Walk" begins there, in motion, but it doesn’t walk toward hope or triumph — it walks toward exposure. What it slowly reveals isn’t just the brutality of a fascist state or the complicity of an entertainment-obsessed population — it reveals something far more uncomfortable: people will tolerate almost anything as long as they’re given permission to watch it from a safe distance.
What makes this film unnerving isn’t simply what happens to the boys forced to walk; it’s what happens to us as we watch them. The film doesn’t flatter the viewer with moral superiority. It quietly makes us complicit, mirroring the fictional audience that sits at home in living rooms across the nation, tuning in like they would a football match. We watch the Walk because we’re drawn into the rules, the strategy, the psychology. We tell ourselves we’re studying it. We’re analysing it. But the longer we stare, the more that interest tilts into voyeurism. And the longer we engage, the more we resemble the people in the film who insist they’re not part of the system — they’re just watching it happen. That quiet moral erosion is the film’s most devastating achievement.
Ray Garraty becomes our reluctant anchor — not a chosen hero but a wary participant who refuses to admit he’s terrified. Cooper Hoffman plays him not as a man defined by courage, but by endurance, and that distinction matters. Garraty isn’t built for violence or rebellion; he’s built for loyalty. He walks because he can’t stop walking. He carries the ache of a boy who still believes there must be a destination, some buried meaning, buried mercy. Every mile strips that belief thinner. You can see his descent begin not in his body but in the softening of his gaze — a kind of spiritual dehydration. Hope drains slowly in this film, not in screams but in quiet concessions: a step taken when courage is gone, a promise made that no longer means anything, a glance upward toward a sky he no longer expects an answer from. Garraty doesn’t break. He dissolves.
McVries, by contrast, is defiance kept warm by empathy. He’s the boy who refuses to let the rules steal his humanity. His hope isn’t naive; it’s disciplined. He knows exactly how rigged this system is, how pointless resistance seems, and still he reaches out. He saves Garraty more than once — not with bravado but with simple presence, with humour when it’s needed, with anger when it matters. He doesn’t let Garraty drift into numbness. He forces him to feel. And that makes McVries dangerous in a way the guards and rifles and warnings are not. He believes connection still matters. In a world engineered to turn people into spectators of each other’s suffering, McVries insists on walking beside someone, not ahead of them.
And then there is Barkovitch. Tremendous characters aren’t written from archetypes — they’re written from wounds. Barkovitch is a walking defence mechanism. He enters the Walk already coiled, already spoiling for conflict, and when he goads another Walker into death, everything that unravels from that moment is painfully human. He pretends victory. He pretends power. But underneath it he is absolutely terrorised by the possibility that the others might be right — that deep down he is the monster they now think he is. That accusation eats him alive. What he becomes isn’t a villain — it’s a portrait of someone swallowed by his own shame, clawing outward in uglier and uglier ways to avoid facing himself. Barkovitch isn’t just another walker; he represents a faction of society stripped of compassion so early that cruelty becomes their only language for survival.
The brilliance of the film is how these three aren’t just characters — they’re social reflections. Garraty is the obedient majority, clinging to belief until belief stops answering back. McVries is the moral resistance kept alive through will alone. Barkovitch is the broken fringe that finds identity in conflict because no one ever showed them another way. Around them orbit dozens of others — the proud, the fearful, the arrogant, the doomed — each a sketch from the crowd we know too well.
And always, watching them, are we.
There is a scene — quiet, almost nothing — where the Walk passes a family watching from their porch. They cheer as if greeting a parade, and it lands like a blade. Because they have no malice. They don’t wish death on anyone. They’re simply used to it. Exposure has numbed them. Consumption has disguised cruelty as culture. And suddenly the Walk isn’t some bizarre dystopian ritual; it’s a mirror held to every system we accept without question because it arrived slowly and politely.
We like to think the Walk is a nightmare confined to fiction, but the truth is far uglier: most of us have been walking our own sanctioned walks since birth, marching to the beat of someone else’s drum and calling it choice. The system doesn’t need guards with rifles to keep us in line — it only needs distraction. Careers, status, screens, ideologies, arguments designed to keep us busy. We aren’t told to obey; we’re encouraged to stay entertained. And so the miles pass unnoticed. We keep moving. We keep consuming. We keep competing. And only when something fractures — when grief or exhaustion finally strips the noise away — do we glimpse how much of our journey has been engineered for us. The Long Walk doesn’t reveal a dystopia. It reveals a design we’ve already accepted.
"The Long Walk" doesn’t entertain. It confronts. It obliterates. And it asks whether survival without soul is survival at all. It asks whether winning means anything if the cost is everything that made you human to begin with. And it walks with that question long after the credits pass. I rarely use the word great because it should be earned, not given. But this film — this cold, gripping, deeply human film — earns it. Some stories end. This one lingers like a bruise that never fades, so I won't need to rewatch it any time soon.
8.5/10
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