Stephen King's best adaptation in years just landed on HBO Max

Stephen King wrote The Long Walk before almost anything else in his career, under the pen name Richard Bachman, and more than forty years later it might have just gotten his best screen treatment yet.

The film landed on HBO Max on 10 July after a solid cinema run, and it is sitting at 88 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes from close to 300 critics, with audiences tracking right behind at 85 per cent. That is a genuinely rare result for a King adaptation. For every Shawshank there are a handful of Cell or Dreamcatcher situations, so a score this consistent between critics and audiences is worth paying attention to.

The premise could not be simpler or more brutal. Fifty teenage boys walk. They cannot stop, cannot drop below four miles an hour, and cannot rest. Fall foul of the pace three times and you are eliminated, in the most permanent sense the film can manage. One boy survives. Everyone else does not.

Francis Lawrence directs, and if the name is familiar it is because he made five Hunger Games films, a franchise King's novel directly inspired decades before anyone else picked up the idea. So this is less a new adaptation borrowing from a genre it helped invent, and more the original text finally getting its moment, long after everything it influenced became massive.

The film also did solid business, pulling in close to $63 million worldwide against a $20 million budget, strong numbers for a bleak, dialogue heavy horror film with no built in franchise behind the name beyond King's own.

If you skipped the cinema run, and plenty of people did given the subject matter is a genuinely upsetting endurance death march with barely a location change, HBO Max just handed you the easy option. No ticket, no babysitter, no talking yourself into leaving the house on a freezing night.

One thing worth knowing before you press play. This is not a jump scare horror film. There is no monster and no supernatural twist to explain any of it away. The horror is entirely that fifty ordinary boys agreed to this, and that crowds line the road cheering them on regardless. It sits closer to a war film than a slasher.

Given how rarely King adaptations land this cleanly, an 88 per cent score is basically a dare. Clear a night, put the phone away, and see if it holds up.