“The Long Walk” is a short lesson in humanity.

That was a lot more movie than I was expecting, and I left the theater both exhausted and emotionally drained. Which is impressive! It takes a lot of skill to make a movie where the audience knows everyone is going to die, and they’re still invested in the characters.

Stephen King wrote this book back in the sixties, and it’s very Vietnam-coded. There’s a televised spectacle of teenaged guys participating in a nebulous cause where they will die and/or watch their friends die all for the glory of a shitty country that put them there in the first place. There were a lot of false starts over the decades to get this book on screen, but the fact that it’s coming out now is fitting. The US feels perched on a knife-edge of civil war where most of the country is in dire economic straits and the only way to boost America back to greatness is upon the backs of the poor under a regime that wants to restrict free-thought and ideas. You could go further and make it into an allegory for capitalism itself, because what is our economic system if not young people sacrificing their bodies at the altar of Work Beyond Reason to keep the country going and make the rich richer while hopefully having enough pennies left to keep a roof over your head now and through old age?

It’s DARK, and real.

But there is lightness, and it comes through the eyes of McVries, an eternal optimist urging his fellow walkers and the audience to appreciate today. Even though I do not consider myself an optimist by any stretch of the imagination, I did feel a kinship with McVries, even more so in this film than in the book. The book is more explicit about his sexuality (he asks Garraty at one point if McVries can jerk him off), but the more subtle queer shading works on film where a Black Southerner with a hard upbringing has a second chance to live his best life, appreciate today, and try to leave the world a better place than he found it. That is me all day, because I do not feel great about the future of the country (or the planet) but, you will miss the sunshine of today by focusing on the clouds of a future that is both uncertain and unpromised. So soak it up. McVries wants Garraty to focus on the beauty of today and make each moment count, and it’s their friendship that carries the film.

Garraty himself, played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s son Cooper (and the acting is indeed on point), has his own backstory that colors how he approaches The Long Walk, but it’s their conversations that keep the film going. What kind of person would you be in your last days or minutes? What does friendship mean to you when it’s going to end in a few hours? What is vengeance without a future?

The Long Walk does have an R-Rating, and after the first murder, I averted my eyes for the rest of them. The murders are what make it a horror film, but I’d argue the premise itself, and how well it relates to our current political climate, is much more horrifying.