‘The Long Walk’ Review: Francis Lawrence’s Stephen King Adaptation Is Bleak, Bruising and Emotionally Affecting

Dystopian cinema doesn’t come much bleaker than the latest Stephen King story to hit the screen, directed by that aficionado of the genre, Francis Lawrence. The Hunger Games filmmaker here does a superb job with material that could easily have proven tiresomely repetitive in lesser hands. While The Long Walk doesn’t entirely escape its narrative limitations, it features generous amounts of the sort of emotion and heart that have marked the best King adaptations. Of course, that doesn’t make it any less grueling.

The novel, written when King was just 19 years old, was the author’s first, although it wasn’t published until 1979 under his pseudonym Richard Bachman. The premise is that after a horrific war that took place decades earlier, the country is in the midst of a severe economic depression. In a bizarre bid to raise morale and counteract what he describes as an “epidemic…