The Long Walk review: Mattie Do brings on a new wave of cult horror

Mattie, Lao horror director Mattie Do creates films that show the gap between the lives of the living and those of the dead. But the individuals who go through this veil often have to pay unimaginable price for it. In her debut feature Chanthaly (which she’s posted on YouTube), the title character can communicate with her dead mother, but only when she forgoes the heart medication that keeps her alive. Do’s second film, My dearest sisterShudder has the story of a young girl who starts to see spirits of others who are dying. But only after developing a degenerative eye condition. While she can use the ghosts to help her win lottery numbers, it causes her severe seizures. The Long Walk, Do’s third collaboration with her screenwriter husband Christopher Larsen, gives its lead spirit medium the most complicated risk-reward analysis of all. These films, taken as a loose trilogy, do little more than create a Lao national horror film.

In case it wasn’t already clear, The Long Walk It isn’t an adaptation of Stephen King’s 1979 Stephen King novel that was published under Richard Bachman. Do’s film centers on a character known only as the Old Man (Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy), a hermit who lives on the outskirts of a small village in Laos, subsisting by selling scrap metal. Fifty years ago, when he was a young boy, the Old Man witnessed a woman’s death in the jungle, and her ghost (Noutnapha Soydara) has accompanied him on his daily walks ever since. He doesn’t just conjure her spirit for company — with her help, he can travel 50 years into the past to intervene in his own unhappy childhood. The changes he influences in his past reverberate into his present — a shattered glass cabinet here, a trail of bodies there. The film becomes increasingly critical of him motives as he struggles with the effects of time travel.

Do reveals the inner workings of the plot slowly, and for long stretches, it’s difficult to place the action in time or space. An early scene at the dusty street market where the Old Man hawks copper wire sees him scanning a vendor’s phone with his arm. The vendor laughs at him because he has outdated technology. A microchip in his skin allows the payment to be accepted. It’s a disorienting moment — What year are you in? — and Do continues to layer it with additional questions. There’s a bit of David Lynch’s opacity in her willingness to show something striking that the audience won’t understand at first, and a bit of Apichatpong Weerasethakul in the way she luxuriates in negative space and atmospherics. Do, however, embraces genre cinema’s simple pleasures, unlike other directors. This is the first of The Long Walk Although it feels dreamlike and discursive at first, once you start to see the picture come together the film gains momentum and becomes real.

It is the gradual opening of the film that reflects Do and Larsen’s patient portrayal of the Old man. Larsen and Do initially present him as an enigmatic cipher. Once The Long Walk When he introduces the time-travel element, his motivations start to become clearer. The Old Man lost his mother to a terrible lung disease as a young boy. His father then left his family farm in order to move to the capital. Watching his mother suffer in her last days radicalized the Old Man, and motivated him to provide assisted-suicide services for women in the village, though it’s unsettlingly unclear whether the women he ushers to peaceful deaths actually asked for his assistance. His actions are reframed and redone through subsequent trips to the time portal. A fiery finale forces him into a reckoning with his life or, perhaps, more precisely, the death. Life he’s led.

A fascinating interview from 2020 with Treteenth FloorDo you know what it means? The Long Walk her “quiet, supernatural science fiction, time traveling, serial killer, Asian arthouse film.” The freedom with which she moves between these genres helps give the film much of its power. Do believes that while a sci-fi version might be more obsessed by the mechanism that allows time travel, Do knows that their audience will just accept this plot point as part of the story and enjoy the result. A typical crime flick might fixate on the whodunit aspects of what befell the woman who dies in the jungle, or the noodle-shop owner who turns up dead in the Old Man’s house early in the film. This never happens. It’s impossible to imagine a film with such complex plot. The Long Walk Dedicated to positive vibes.

To the extent The Long Walk embraces any one genre, it’s a ghost story. As in Do’s two previous films, emissaries from the spirit world both kickstart the film’s action, and act as a real force in the lives of its still-mortal characters. That’s thanks in part to Do’s distinctly Lao perspective. “We’re still very traditional in a lot of ways,” she told Senses of Cinema in 2017. “We still believe in possession, we still believe in hauntings, we still believe in rebirth and reincarnation. If I was to say that I was being haunted, no one would say, ‘No, you’re not.’ They would ask for more details. They would believe me right away.” That’s all evident in the strikingly no-nonsense way ghosts appear onscreen in her films. You can find it here. The Long Walk, the police don’t think the Old Man is crazy for talking to spirits. They request him to contact them.

The so-called “elevated horror” movement, typified by films like A24’s The Witch The HereditaryWith its unique set of conventions and tropes,, is a well-known force in the genre cinema. What’s fascinating about Do’s work, and The Long Walk Particularly, it is the way she draws from tradition and creates something entirely new. The Long Walk The film is full of tension, emotional complexity, slow pacing and beautiful cinematography. It also contains some horrifying images. At the same time, it doesn’t especially resemble Babadook Saint Maud, or any of its other “elevated” peers. That has a lot to do with Do’s Lao heritage, and at least as much to do with her inspiring go-for-broke attitude. It’s a film that initially scans as minimalist, but that slowly reveals itself to be wildly, vividly maximalist. You will need patience to get the most out of it. In return it pays you handsomely. It’s easily one of the finest horror films of the year thus far.

Do is often regarded as both the first Lao horror director and first female director to create a Lao film. That’s given her the unique opportunity to shape a national cinema in her own image. The clash of old and new is evident in her movies. There are idyllic scenes and bustling tuk-tuks, and there’s even a hint of futuristic technology. In the best way possible, it feels like she’s making it up as she goes along. The Long Walk She makes an argument so compelling that viewers must agree with her.

The Long WalkThe film has been released theatrically in a limited quantity and can be rented or purchased on streaming digital sites such as Netflix. Google Play YouTube.