Over Labor Day weekend on August 30, the historic Culver Theatre in Los Angeles transformed into a gym of orange treadmills, with actors barking orders like drill sergeants. The rules were simple: keep a steady pace of three miles per hour for the film's entire 1 hour and 48 minutes or be escorted out. Lionsgate's so-called "treadmill elimination event" replaced seats with machines and comfort with endurance. A press release spelled it out: "If you don't keep up a pace faster than 3 mph, you'll have to leave the theater—even if the movie isn't over."
Francis Lawrence's "The Long Walk" adapts Stephen King's early novel, written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. He wrote this when he was 19 and still in university. The premise is terrifying in its simplicity: one hundred teenage boys must walk without stopping. If they slow down, stumble, or rest, they are executed on the spot by government soldiers. The last survivor wins fame, fortune, and one wish. Everyone else wins a swift, televised death. There are no breaks, no shade, and no reason, just the endless road.
Leading "The Long Walk" is Cooper Hoffman, an actor stepping into one of the most demanding legacies in contemporary American cinema. As the son of Philip Seymour Hoffman, his career carries the weight of expectation shaped by a lineage of uncompromising performances. Philip's collaborations with Paul Thomas Anderson in "Boogie Nights" (1997), "Magnolia" (1999), and "The Master" (2012) remain landmarks of modern character acting. His roles in "Capote" (2005) won him an Oscar and "Doubt" (2008) further expanded that reputation.
Cooper Hoffman began his own journey, utilizing his privilege as a "nepo baby" under Anderson's direction in "Licorice Pizza" (2021). As a self-assured, entrepreneurial teenager infatuated with an older woman, he demonstrated an early command of tone that marked him as a performer with genuine potential.
"The Long Walk" isn't under the banner of such a huge director, rather from a frivolous association that comes with Stephen King novels, especially one he wrote at such an early age. Francis Lawrence directs without the grand auteur framework that once surrounded his father's career, and this smaller scale becomes a test of authenticity. The film showed Cooper's ability to sustain focus, gain the audience's attention and goodwill. In a film that has every risk to appear monotonous considering the simple premise, the gestures are calculated, the fatigue convincing and the endurance believable.
Lawrence, who previously directed and gathered much acclaim from "The Hunger Games series", returns to dystopia with none of the glamour. There are no rebellions, no montages, and no heroes, just boys disintegrating in real time. The road stretches infinitely, a line of grey cutting through fog and despair. The cinematography by Jo Willems traps every frame in repetition. The camera refuses escape, forcing the viewer to experience the monotony firsthand. By the midpoint, even the most alert audience member starts to slump in their seat—or in early screenings, fall off the treadmill.
The film is nearly silent except for the rhythm of footsteps, the occasional cough, and the unmistakable crack of a rifle when someone fails. Each gunshot lands with bureaucratic efficiency. There are no screams, no slow-motion flourishes, no exaggerated dramatic reactions and monologues; just the sound of one life ending and the rest trying not to notice. The horror lies in how ordinary it becomes.
Lawrence stages the film like a psychological experiment: remove comfort, stretch time, and observe what happens to empathy. The screenplay offers almost no exposition. We never learn how the world arrived at this ritual or why the boys volunteered. The absence of backstory turns the film into a moral vacuum. It feels less like science fiction and more like a study of compliance.
Hoffman anchors the entire experiment. He lets his body tell the story, the way his gait stiffens, his eyes lose focus, his shoulders drop an inch lower with each scene. At times, he looks eerily like his father, especially in moments of quiet collapse. Yet Cooper Hoffman seems less interested in channeling legacy than in mastering stillness. His Ray Garraty in the end is just someone too stubborn and too fuelled by revenge to stop.
David Jonsson plays Peter McVries, the closest thing the film has to a friend or philosopher. He cracks jokes, tells stories, and mocks the absurdity of their situation. His presence gives the film its rare moments of relief in the otherwise suffocating state of the other characters .
In "The Long Walk", everything unfolds with institutional precision. Soldiers shoot without hesitation. Trucks roll forward to collect bodies. The march continues. It is the kind of horror that feels plausible because it already exists in smaller, metaphorical forms: systems that grind people down while calling it purpose. In a world where massacres happen and inhuman conditions sustain as a means to mine gold to serve capitalistic states, this film feels oddly relevant.
Some critics have praised the film's rigor calling it "emotionally pulverizing," or a "slow-burn terror built from exhaustion". Others have complained that it's too monotonous, too cold, or too determined to prove a point. They are all correct. The monotony is the message, the repetition, the punishment. The film is designed to erode attention, to make the audience feel complicit in the spectacle of survival. By the final act, viewers understand why those treadmills were such an inspired, if sadistic, idea.
Lawrence ends the film without resolution. The last boy keeps walking, the road stretching endlessly ahead. There is no triumph, no applause, just movement. It's a conclusion that mirrors the experience of watching the film: you leave the theater aware of every step you take, grateful that walking still feels like a choice.
"The Long Walk" has achieved something few films dare, it turns monotony into meaning. It suggests that horror is especially terrifying when it mimics real life situations, compliance to systems that don't care about people and systems that keep going because nobody dares to stop.