Final weekend, I wandered into my native cinema with zero expectations and even much less data. My spouse had invited me to see a movie known as The Lengthy Stroll, which I knew nothing about. What adopted was probably the most visually arresting cinema expertise I’ve had in years.
First, a warning: this can be a brutal movie. The story revolves round a dystopian competitors the place younger males stroll till they drop useless; Stephen King at his most cruel. However what acquired my pulse racing wasn’t the cruelty; it was how astonishingly stunning each single body regarded.
Let me be clear. Director Francis Lawrence has crafted one thing right here that feels extra like a feature-length images exhibition than a film.
There is a shot early on the place the boys are silhouetted towards an enormous dam at dawn, the speeding water creating this otherworldly soundscape whereas the sunshine catches the exhaustion already creeping throughout their faces. It is the form of picture that feels prefer it belongs on a gallery wall, not buried in a multiplex displaying between superhero sequels.
The cinematographer Jo Willems, too, deserves a standing ovation. Take into account the recurring motif of the limitless freeway stretching towards the horizon: it must be monotonous, repetitive, boring as hell. As an alternative, every variation looks like a distinct artist’s interpretation of the identical topic.
Generally it is bathed in golden hour gentle that makes the asphalt shimmer like water. At others it is shrouded in pre-dawn mist that transforms the walkers into ghostly figures rising from nowhere. There’s one specific aerial shot, the place the road of boys curves alongside a rural street, that Gregory Crewdson would have been happy with.
Why it is totally different
However this is what will get me: the movie was shot totally in chronological order. And this is not simply manufacturing trivia: it essentially impacts how the film appears and feels. You may actually watch these actors bodily deteriorate, body by body.
Because the drama progresses, the digicam captures each blister, each second of real exhaustion, each actual bond fashioned between forged members who had been truly dwelling via a model of what their characters skilled (minus the bloody deaths, in fact).
What Lawrence understood is that the actual drama is not within the dystopian world-building; it is within the faces. The digicam turns into obsessively targeted on expressions, on the micro-changes that occur when somebody realizes they’re about to die, on the best way exhaustion strips away all pretense.
Can now we have extra?
All of which makes me surprise how typically we’ll get to have these big-screen experiences sooner or later. I am not naive about cinema’s challenges. Streaming has taken away a lot of the field workplace, audiences appear content material with mediocrity delivered to their dwelling rooms, and the artwork of cinematography typically looks like a misplaced craft in our CG-dominated panorama.
However then one thing like The Lengthy Stroll comes alongside and reminds you what cinema can obtain when filmmakers nonetheless give a rattling about visible storytelling. This is not only a film: it is a masterclass in how each body can carry emotional weight, how magnificence and brutality can coexist, and the way the digicam can turn into a personality in its personal proper.
Francis Lawrence has created one thing that transcends its supply materials and its style. He is made a horrifying movie that is additionally one of the crucial stunning issues I’ve seen. So in an period the place so many motion pictures really feel disposable, The Lengthy Stroll feels important: not simply as leisure, however as artwork. I urge you to go see it.