I have to imagine it’s an immense amount of pressure to be the first of something, never mind the only. For Mattie Do this means being Laos’ first and only woman director. Her newest film, THE LONG WALK, written by Christopher Larsen, is also the country’s first to screen theatrically in the US. Pulling together a rich mixture of cultural ghosts, time travel, and the consequences of what we tell ourselves are our best intentions, THE LONG WALK is virtually guaranteed to seep its way into your psyche long after the credits roll, leaving you stung with the tang of loneliness and heartache spun around the edges of an indescribable terror.
It tells the story of an old man (Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy) with the ability to communicate with and see the dead, who, as a boy (played by Por Silatsa), befriends the spirit of a young woman (Noutnapha Soydara) and later seeks her help to prevent his mother’s suffering when she falls ill. To call it a slow burn isn’t quite correct. Everything about THE LONG WALK is more deliberate than it at first appears, and its languid pace allows for us to sink deeper into the implications and consequences of the story before us, leaving breadcrumbs along the way that feel almost too grim to piece together. If you had the ability to talk to and time travel with ghosts, would you? If it meant saving the person you love the most? If you could convince yourself it was the right thing to do? Would you carry on or stop to wonder at the possible outcomes? Do and Larsen seem all too aware of the potential for catastrophic but slowly spreading horror at the heart of these kinds of questions and never shy away from diving into them.
It’s hard to talk too much about a plot like this without worrying about spilling an important detail meant to be revealed at a later point, so I’ll have to do my best to follow the film’s example and talk around it rather than about it. In some previous time, when a young boy finds a dying young woman in the woods off the path to his house, he stays with her in her final moments and scavenges her bag. Soon afterward he begins to see her everywhere, though she never speaks or crosses certain areas. In the future, another young woman who runs a noodle shop, Lina (Vilouna Phetmany), seeks the help of the village scavenger who is rumored to be able to talk to ghosts to find her missing mother. Soon the two timelines converge and twist upon each other until we’re very nearly not sure who or which is to be trusted as the real, true, current one. The truth, of course, is far more complicated than that anyway, and Do makes sure we’re tossed to sea long enough to realize that such questions are arbitrary and perhaps even meaningless.
More important than the question of time and perception is that of motivation. Why do we choose to do the things we do? Do we even truly choose them at all, or simply watch them unfold before us in awestruck terror? For the characters in THE LONG WALK, the answer is a bit of both, depending on who you are. The old man convinces himself that everything he does is to spare his mother’s suffering and the suffering of several other women in the village, but intention and action hardly ever match up. Watching the pieces of THE LONG WALK fall into place is a gut-wrenching experience with the kind of emotional punch that leaves you dazed. It is at once an endlessly bleak and hopeful journey through one man’s efforts to heal damage done to him by circumstances he had no way of controlling, exerting his will on the lives of others while telling himself he means well.
There’s more than one way to be haunted and more than one kind of ghost at work here, each with their own story and power. From the looming influence of American business positioning themselves as help for the poor village farmers and then expecting to be literally repaid for their efforts in a community that struggles to feed its families to the hubris of a man who hides as much as he helps, and a child caught between the two and desperate to make something better of himself than either of the options before him, there’s plenty to haunt us. It’s an unusual, unorthodox way to spotlight both cultural issues and universal issues with which we seem to grow only more familiar, and a shining example of horror’s potential to allow space to explore new perspectives.
The performances at the heart of THE LONG WALK are pitch perfect, dancing the line between understated and emotional in just the right way to keep pulling us in. The central conflict of the story works so well and gathers its unsettling power thanks to the way we have grown to understand each person’s journey. The more we learn about them, the more complex the situation becomes, until its paths diverge in mostly horrific ways we are forced to watch unfold and truths come out that neither we as an audience nor the young boy we follow are prepared to endure. It’s an emotionally charged, rough, but necessary watch from a voice we should feel privileged to have enter our cinematic conversations.
THE LONG WALK is in theaters now and comes to On-Demand and VOD from Yellow Veil Pictures March 1, 2022.
Tags: Chanthamone Inoudome, Christopher Larsen, Ghosts, Laos, Mattie Do, Noutnapha Soydara, Por Silatsa, Sci-Fi, The Long Walk, Time Travel, Vilouna Phetmany, Vithaya Sombath, Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy, Yellow Veil Pictures
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