In adapting Stephen King’s 1979 novel, The Long Walk, originally published under a pseudonym, the filmmakers made the bold decision to stick relentlessly to the walk itself. The walk is an annual televised public spectacle in an impoverished, bankrupt America following an economically ruinous war. It involves fifty young male contestants who trudge on, hour after hour without a break, with the last one standing declared the winner. He’s given immense wealth as well as one additional wish.

All the others, as they lose their ability to maintain the required pace of three miles per hour, due to leg cramps, injuries, illness, hysteria, escape attempts, and sheer exhaustion, get shot by the armed military men tracking them in tanks through a desolate, depopulated countryside. It’s a dystopian allegory that now seems prescient, in keeping with other bleakly topical hits like Squid Game and The Hunger Games and another upcoming adaptation of King’s novel The Running Man. King himself admits that the “merciless” novel he began at age nineteen, back in 1967, which reflected the wretched realities of his own era during the Vietnam War, got thrown in a drawer where it lay unread for years because it seemed too harsh for the commercial publishing market.

But King’s grueling narrative seems like it ought to be just the ticket for 2025. I imagined the obvious choice in adapting the material would be to go for flashbacks showing how and why each of the desperate main contestants was driven to sign up for this almost certainly fatal trek. It’s an old narrative strategy, especially familiar in film noir, but it’s a good one. See Jules Dassin’s harrowing prison-escape drama Brute Force (1947), for example, or Stanley Kubrick’s heist-gone-wrong masterpiece The Killing (1956), both extremely tense and despairing films.