Try not to lose yourself

Movies talk to each other. What did the films of 2025 have to say? This is a look at how three movies from the past year tackle similar subjects in different ways. Be warned, SPOILERS for The Long Walk and No Other Choice follow.

It was a big year at the movies for Stephen King and Donald Westlake. King saw several of his works adapted into films, including The Monkey (dogshit), The Running Man (cowardly dogshit) and The Long Walk, although those latter two were based on novels originally written under King’s pseudonym Richard Bachman. Westlake died in 2008, so he was not around to see No Other Choice, adapted from his novel The Ax; and Play Dirty (even worse dogshit than The Running Man and The Monkey), “inspired” by the novels of his own pseudonym, Richard Stark. Whose given name King swiped to tag on Bachman, by the way — he wanted to honor a grim writer when crafting his own darker works.

Part of what makes The Monkey so insulting is how it makes a bad joke out of a solid horror story about death, and as I have gone on at length about, Play Dirty is even worse in trading lean meanness for mawkish gaggery. Edgar Wright’s take on The Running Man feints at political outrage while muddling and soft-pedaling King’s ferocious anger (as opposed to the 1988 film, which is goofy but reworks the story significantly to make that tone fit). But even among these tales, The Ax and The Long Walk stand out in their relentless bleakness. And the films adapting them take that seriously — to a point.

***

The hook of The Long Walk is an all-timer: A group of young men start walking down the road and must maintain a pace of three miles an hour; fall below that three times and they are shot to death. No rest, just walking until only one is left standing. Why they do this has an easy answer — dystopian society, ritualized blood sacrifice, the winner gets The Prize, which is a billion dollars and anything they want for the rest of their lives — but there is a dark chasm below that, because while all teen dudes register, participation in the Walk is voluntary. Besides the draw of unimaginable wealth, the arrogance and inexperience of youth that thinks nothing truly bad can happen to it surely plays a role here. But that is only part of what gets the walkers to the starting line, and the real question is what keeps them going.

King’s 1979 story has echoed through other tales of teens forced to oppose each other unto death and it’s unsurprising that Francis Lawrence, director of most of the Hunger Games movies, was tapped for direction here. But he and screenwriter JT Mollner generally keep away from the politicking and plotting of those stories and, like King, hew closely to the boys and the Walk. The movie begins when the Walk does and ends when it ends and while it takes place the camera generally stays close to the characters — in particular Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson, but covering a half dozen other important roles among the participants — as they walk and talk and occasionally get killed. There is no big rebellion, there is a lot of bullshitting, and there is death after death after death, sometimes in the background as the main characters march on and sometimes right in front of their — and our — faces. 

There is an extremely obvious metaphor in young men being conscripted into a murder machine because society says that’s what’s necessary, and King originally wrote The Long Walk in the late 60s when people his age were being drafted to go fight and die in Vietnam. But I’ve always found that to be not just simplistic but incomplete, both in terms of King-as-Bachman’s broader pessimism verging on nihilism and in the particulars of the story itself. A war story will often involve brutal killing tearing friends asunder, but while war is hell it is not zero-sum for the band of brothers brought together to face a foe. The dark despair of The Long Walk is how a participant will not just see his buddies die but needs them to so he can survive, and how even knowing and seeing that, he makes friends anyway. Hoffman and Jonsson have great chemistry as fast pals and maybe something more. the book’s gay subtext is brought more to the fore here, but the entire cast is great in this regard (in particular Charlie Plummer as Barkovitch, a try-hard asshole who alienates everyone — Plummer asks for no sympathy but shows how this dude just can’t figure out how to not suck). These guys can’t help shooting the shit before the shits shoot them, and they repeatedly try to turn away from each other and repeatedly fail. Their bodies and minds start to disintegrate but they still feel the connections between themselves, and still feel the pain of their severing. Even as it means each Walker still standing is one step closer to victory.

***

The hook of The Ax is an all-timer: A man laid off from his old job can’t find work, so he decides to murder every other person in his field who’s also on the job market so he’ll get the next available position. The man, Burke Devore in Westlake’s novel, is a paper company mid-level manager and has never killed anyone before, but his savings are almost gone, his wife has been forced to go back to work and his son will soon be in college, and he’s getting desperate. He comes up with a clever scheme of creating a fake ad for paper company work and soliciting the resumes of his competition, and he figures there are six people in his general area (Connecticut in the mid-90s, while paper is on its way out the internet does not factor here) who would beat him out for a job. So they have to go.

Park Chan-wook keeps the premise in No Other Choice while making some significant changes. Foremost among them shifting the action to present-day South Korea, an understandable choice; along with changing the number of victims to three instead of six, another decision that makes sense logistically (and has an echo in The Long Walk’s adaptation reducing the number of participants from 100 to 50 — it’s one thing to read about death in a book, another thing to see it over and over again on the big screen). And while Lee Byung-hun’s redundant patriarch now has a daughter with a learning disability in addition to his a son (and a suspiciously metaphorical gardening hobby), he is interestingly still a paper man who takes pride in his work. No longer having that identity unmoors him from his other roles as father and especially husband, with wife Son Ye-Jin trying to take practical actions to salvage what she can and keep the family together while clocking Lee’s increasing erratic behavior, including his jealous suspicion that she’s fucking her new boss.

Son is not, but in the book Devore’s wife does have an affair while he’s distracted with planning and, uh, executing his strategy to get re-hired. This comes out in a lengthy monologue at the couples therapy she has insisted Devore attend and it is a remarkable, sustained outpouring of recognition and connection from a writer who generally didn’t give his female characters the depth of his male ones. And it is quite purposefully the one instance in the book that is a glimpse of thoughts happening outside of Devore’s head, outside of his frustrations and justifications and easy-to-agree-with bitterness at a corporate world that tossed him aside. The reader is trapped in Devore’s first-person narration that is increasingly cold and isolated and individualist (taking on the very qualities of the capitalist structure that he rails against), and Park does not try to replicate that narrow view.

Some of this is apparent in the film’s view of Lee, which has enough distance to emphasize the pathetic aspects of his behavior. Some of this is in its view of Son, who is given more to do than in the book and indeed starts to suspect Lee’s scheme when Devore’s wife never does. And a surprising part of the movie is devoted to the life of Lee’s first victim, who is both older and more depressed than Lee, reacting to his own ejection from the working world by getting drunk in his underwear while his wife yells at him (before she cheats on him with the delivery boy). Park spends a large amount of time not just on Lee’s comedically inept stalking of this couple but on their lives apart from Lee’s surveillance — they are an obvious reflection to Lee’s own family life that would have been stronger as a movie-long parallel instead of a lengthy cul de sac (Lee’s other victims do not get similar screen time). And this culminates in Lee’s first attempt at murder, which is first thwarted by his own lack of capability and his victim’s confusion (he assumes Lee is the guy cuckolding him) and then the wife’s counterattack. Park shoots this with a sadistic eye, not for violence but for incompetence, dragging out every misunderstanding and fumbling of these three people as they yell at each other and wrestle for weapons. It’s skillfully done and excruciating bordering on enervating to watch, a skilled technician recreating the wacky violence of a 90s post-Tarantino crime thriller. When the wife decides to just shoot her husband anyway, saving Lee the trouble, it comes as a confused relief for the viewer. Instead of placing us in the mindset of a man who is making unconscionable decisions, Park is pulling back to joke at the action.

But the second victim is a different story. He’s the other end of Lee’s frustration, a man who is working to make the best of things, taking a humiliating job as a shoe salesman because it is a job and that’s what’s best for him and his family. And instead of haplessly stumbling into the death he needs, Lee ruthlessly lures his mark away by empathizing with him as a fellow laid-off worker and father. Lee is telling the truth in service of a lie that will kill, and that truth makes a very real connection between killer and victim that both feel. This cuts much, much deeper.

*** 

One of the secondary characters in The Long Walk is a cocky shit-talker and ball-buster, Ben Wang plays him with the pitch-perfect charisma of your biggest buddy who’s also the group asshole. At least at the start. Following the book, Wang maintains his wiseassery for a time but his jokes and confidence fade as he presses on. He outlasts many other Walkers, but while Hoffman and Jonsson and others crack up Wang shuts down. He stays alive for a time, much longer than would seem possible, but he walked his self away.

What makes The Ax so uncomfortable is not just how Burke Devore eliminates the part of him that is not operating under corporate kill or be killed logic (upon learning his wife has cheated on him with her boss he decides to kill the guy and it might as well be him choosing what to watch on TV for all the moral consideration he goes through), it’s how so much of his self is already unmoored by not having a job. By not having HIS job. Westlake never implies that Devore is lying when he describes his skill and indeed a fair amount of research clearly went into making him a plausible paper man. Devore has spent a large part of his life learning and developing this part of himself and seeing it valued, and now he finds no one wants this. Devore makes a big deal about being able to provide for his family but this isn’t exactly emasculation (although perhaps it is something that men are encouraged and allowed to feel more deeply, per Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tehanu). If we define ourselves through others, what does it mean for the self we thought was clear when others no longer see anything worth recognizing? When they create a system, be it work or Walk, that imposes self-negation as part of its function?

Park adapts the story of The Ax but for much of the movie, he is creating a system with the function of negation. The filmmaking (choose your adjective, the critics did – bravura? devious? audacious?) wrings tension out of actors placed in dangerous or complex situations, but Park doesn’t have something like Brian DePalma’s underlying anger and embrace of contradiction and he doesn’t let Lee have the thwarted and crippled rage of Devore. Lee is more concerned about losing his stuff and the fact that he sees his family as an extension of said stuff is well done, but Park consistently places the viewer on the outside, watching him rather than feeling him. In the film, Son does not have an affair and Lee’s fury at what he thinks is her infidelity is played as one more mark against an unhinged guy – this also has the effect of making Son an innocent and therefore less interesting as a character. Devore’s wife reacts to his ongoing self-destruction, which she can sense but does not know the full scale of, with a selfish action of her own as a way not to be a bystander in her family’s disintegration. It’s a messy connection that No Other Choice needed more of, like the decision Lee makes to forgo the bond he’s made with that second victim in order to follow his plan.

***

One possible reaction to a nihilist system is to reflect negation back. Bachman’s Long Walk has one of King’s best endings, one that follows the story’s path and strides straight into darkness, and the movie makes its main deviation from the book in its twist on this. Lawrence’s Hunger Games history comes in strong toward the end as Hoffman and Jonsson discuss what they would do should one of them win — Jonsson dreams of using the Prize’s money to change the world while Hoffman plans to kill the overseer of the Walk (a hammy Mark Hamill) to avenge his father. A revolution or at least vengeance is possible. But while Hoffman’s character does come out on top in the book (without any concern for his dead dad), in the film he sacrifices himself to give Jonsson the victory. It’s confusing (Hoffman’s act robs Jonsson of the one decision he has left, dying on his own terms; in trying to upend the cliché of a black guy dying for a white one the film takes the black guy’s agency) and more oddly it is incredibly cheap-looking, like the filmmakers ran out of budget at the same time they ran out of Walkers. 

In front of a crummy green screen, Jonsson decides to follow Hoffman’s plan instead of working for broader societal change. Fun in the moment (Hamill knows how to take a bullet) but dashing hopes that the movie went out of its way to cram into a story that worked better without them. What does work is the final self-destruction and its rationale – Jonsson honors his friend at the expense of himself, out of grief and rage at his friend’s death. The final severed connection of the Walk, the last relationship ripped apart, also severs Jonsson’s connection to himself. Over and over we see these boys make the decision to acknowledge each other in defiance of the doom they face and that acknowledgement betrays Jonsson even as he survives.

No Other Choice hews closer to the ending of its source material, but Park finally nails the tone with his adjustments. Lee kills his final victim and his scheme is successful, he’s employed at another paper company that is now down a manager. Unlike the novel, Son is aware of his crimes and she chooses not to turn him in, but it’s clear she’s separated entirely from Lee as a husband and father, as a provider, as every identity he had and could have had again. But Lee is happy, because he’s got a job.

The role is not the same as his previous position, though. Plants have become almost fully automated and Lee’s only responsibility is to keep an eye on things as the robots learn to do the work that used to be done by people (and it is implied that once the bots are fully up to speed, Lee will be out of a job again). But again, he is happy, and Park shows him walking through a factory populated by mechanisms, by things, and weaving in and out of them like a dancer in his element. There is plenty to watch in motion but nothing to connect with, and Lee and his director are united in their oversight of a complex system’s execution. Jonsson’s final action in The Long Walk is to turn and start walking again, alone and destroyed; Lee is alone and content, a hollow man who doesn’t know he has emptied himself. Despite missteps along the way, both films understand they can only stray so far from where they have to end.