108 minutes, opens on Sept 11

★★★★☆

The story: The United States of the near future is a dictatorship. Fifty teen boys are chosen by lottery for an annual marathon, walking continuously at three miles (about 4.8km) an hour until only one is left alive to win any prize he wishes.

To be an adolescent in the totalitarian dystopias of American film-maker Francis Lawrence is to be sacrificed in a death sport for the honour of inspiring a depressed post-war nation.

The Long Walk is another chilling fable by the director of The Hunger Games series (2012 to 2023). It is based on American horror writer Stephen King’s first novel, written in 1979 as a Vietnam War allegory.

The race has no destination, no finish line and no rest. The Major (Mark Hamill) and his military convoy are the escorts, shooting stragglers along the way in quick kills of brutal realism.

This walk-or-die story of stark stripped-down simplicity derives harrowing power by focusing on just the walkers – centrally, the sustaining friendship between big-hearted Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) and charismatic Peter McVries (David Jonsson).

Hoffman is evocative casting: His late father, Oscar-winning American actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, was Plutarch Heavensbee in The Hunger Games films. Jonsson is a major discovery, and the diverse personalities include an antagonist (Charlie Plummer), the Major’s illegitimate son (Garrett Wareing) and a character played by Ben Wang (Karate Kid: Legends, 2025; American Born Chinese, 2023).

You are embedded with the excellent young ensemble so that you feel their exhaustion, their blisters, their hopelessness and their determination. You witness their conflicts, but ultimately, the brotherhood, as they help one another endure the next mile.