A boy (Por Silatsa) discovers a young woman (Noutnapha Soydara) laying in the weeds after a motorbike accident that would take her life.  Afraid, he does not report the body and the woman is unable to be cremated so her spirit is bound to walk the earth.  Fifty years later, the woman still visits the boy, now a man (Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy), and he discovers that she is able to transport him back in time.  With her help, the man finds himself as a boy and teaches him how to mix a medicine that would help ease his dying mother’s (Chanthamone Inoudome) pain, but as the man continues to meddle in the past, he drastically changes the trajectory of his own life in the process. 

The Long Walk is a meditative and tragic ghost story directed by Mattie Do and written by her husband, Christopher Larsen.  After a successful festival run in 2019, Yellow Veil Pictures gave the film a VOD release in the States in 2022.  It is a quiet and confounding film that draws on many supernatural elements and turns them completely on their heads.  One of the most stunning things about the film is how it opens up the narrative.  Larsen does not go into an explanation of the mechanics of the supernatural here, but through a few simple visual cues we know all that is needed and from there the film constantly oscillates between the two time periods until everything melds together.  

Chanthalungsy is at the head of the film, a hermetic man that gets by selling used scrap material to the local markets.  His presence on screen is calming yet mysterious at the same time, and it makes it very easy to find compassion for this man that seems stuck in a world rapidly moving on without him.  He holds very traditional views, preferring to do things the old way, but does not shy away completely from technology.  He embraces the solar panels used to power his family home, an advancement his father rejected, and he prefers to do business through the tracker chip implanted in his wrist even if it is an older model.  Think of it as using a Nokia in a market boasting the Nth generation of flagship smartphones.  Despite his interaction with these advances, he still feels wholly out of place when a jet engine soars – and roars – above his head in one of the first scenes of the film. It is these few elements that help place us in time with the narrative, a near future, not unlike our own. 

His solitude is only magnified when it is revealed that for fifty years he has walked the road near his home with the ghost of the young woman by his side, yet she never speaks a word to him, even as a child.  Soydara, too, brings a great deal of empathy to the film.  The silent role has many challenges, especially as she is the entry point into the realm of the supernatural in the film and, in conjunction with Do’s direction, the pair have many creative solutions to make sure the audience knows enough of what is going on at any given time to stay invested.  The Long Walk is not a film that is interested in explaining itself, but through visual cues, we are given our bearings; the jet overhead, or a cracked window.  The film is practically devoid of exposition in a traditional sense, utilizing the flashback sequences as a separate narrative that informs and connects to the man’s story instead of just backloading the audience with character information.  This allows Soydra’s woman to shed the burden of the plot and focus solely on the emotion of the role.  Through her silence, Soydra relies on her expressions to inform us of the relationship she shares with the man as they bond through their loneliness through the years. 

The third element of The Long Walk is the young boy, played expressively by Silatsa.  Much of the narrative weight of the film lies on the young actor’s shoulders, and it is a credit not only to Silasta’s natural instinct in front of the camera, but also Do’s direction that he is able to clearly work in the complicated story.  The boy has the largest range asked by the script and his slow transformation into an angry, vengeful boy is achieved in a meticulous arc for the character.  Like the entirety of the film, the performance is captivating in the moment, and tragic in the greater picture.  Silasta also bears the burden of much of the dialogue and therefore exposition in the film, but Larsen again ensures that much of the background knowledge is delivered through very natural character moments as we see the boy interact with his dying mother and angry father (Vithaya Sombath), in addition to his future self and the ghost woman. Larsen’s script does an excellent job at showing instead of telling, and it is seen perfectly in Silasta’s performance where he never tells us what he is feeling, but rather acts on those emotions. 

The Long Walk is a simple film on the outside, yet it contains so much depth as it explores themes of guilt, greed, and regret as it seeks to answer the age-old question that has haunted man: what if I could change just one thing? What if I had then, the knowledge I have now? Larsen’s script and Do’s direction make for a chilling and upsetting ghost story that stands apart from conventions. With strong performances across the board, The Long Walk captures our attention early on the merits of the cast as the narrative takes its time to really come into focus. It is not until we have the knowledge of the story – the knowledge of a life well-lived – do we realize all of what we have seen and how it is connected to each other. There are few films that will linger in the minds of the audience like The Long Walk.