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The Long Walk: Grief, Guilt, and the Inescapable Weight of the Past
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Science Fiction Film Club
The Long Walk: Grief, Guilt, and the Inescapable Weight of the Past
Ghosts, time travel, and terrible choices in rural Laos…
By Kali Wallace
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Published on June 11, 2025
Credit: Lao Art Media
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Credit: Lao Art Media
The Long Walk (Lao: ບໍ່ມີວັນຈາກ) (2019). Directed by Mattie Do. Written by Christopher Larsen. Starring Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy, Vilouna Phetmany, Por Silatsa, and Noutnapha Soydara.
Normally when I write about a movie from a country this film club hasn’t visited before, I would give a little overview of that country’s cinema and film history to provide some context and general background knowledge. I have to do something different here, because Laos doesn’t really have a film history. So few movies have been made in Laos that it made international news in 2008 when a movie was filmed as a collaboration between a Thai director and a Lao producer. There are only four movie theaters in the entire country, which has a population of nearly 8 million.
The reasons for that are complex but also exactly what you might expect: a mixture of colonialism, war, and extreme censorship. Laos was a French colony for the first half of the 20th century, but unlike other colonized countries (like Algeria and Tunisia, for example), it wasn’t a place where early French filmmakers went to make movies in exotic locations. Laos gained independence in the 1950s, only to immediately fall into a 16-year-long war between the existing royalist government and a communist movement—or, perhaps more accurately, a proxy war between North Vietnam, supported by China and the Soviet Union, and South Vietnam, supported by the United States. During the Vietnam War, Laos was invaded by North Vietnam and bombed nearly to oblivion by the United States, earning it the extremely dubious distinction of being the world’s most heavily bombed country relative to its population size. We all know how the Vietnam War ended.
In Laos, the communist government that took power after the monarchy was overthrown kept the country relatively isolated from international relations while also maintaining extremely strict control over press and media. Fifty years of near-absolute government control over what can be broadcast or portrayed has understandably made it difficult for a native film or television industry to grow. The first national television station was formed in 1983, but both before and after that many Laotians got their media via spillover television from neighboring countries, especially Thailand, which sits across the river from the capital city of Vientiane and has historically been (and continues to be) a prolific producer of filmed media.
It’s not that nobody wanted to make movies. Laotian filmmakers have been working, in many different ways over the years, to establish a local film industry. There are filmmakers and production companies, and there have been for decades. The problem is that having the resources to film movies is one thing, but creating a film industry with the infrastructure, expertise, and resources to do that consistently, then release the films to the public, is a very different challenge. The government controlled all filmmaking until 1989, after which point independent studios were finally allowed to form. But there was still no money and no real pool of expertise to pull from.
In 1995, filmmaker Som Ock Southiponh, who co-founded the studio Lao Inter-Art, explained the situation for filmmakers in Laos: “Laotian cinema does not exist. There are no other independent filmmakers in Laos. There are nine of us at Lao-Inter Art, all of whom left the Ministry of Information and Culture to help form the company. All of us received our education abroad in such countries as Bulgaria, Russia and Czechoslovakia. The only thing we can hope for is that through co-production, meaning 100% foreign financing and 100% Laotian talent, Laotian cinema can keep, at least momentarily, its artisans active until better days arrive.”
Those better days are finally underway for Laotian filmmakers. A very small but very significant boom in Laotian filmmaking starting in the early 2000s with Sabaidee Luang Prabang (2008), the co-production I mentioned above. That movie is a romance story that was, by director Sakchai Deenan’s own admission, specifically chosen so as to appeal to audiences used to Thai dramas and to not to give the government censors anything to complain about. But Laotian filmmakers didn’t stick to what was safe, and there are several people making films now. Their films also showcase a broader range of genres and styles. Director Anysay Keola’s At the Horizon (2012), for example, is a violent thriller that had some trouble finagling its way past the censors, but it was released and it was successful.
That brings us to director Mattie Do, who has the most charmingly random filmmaker origin story I’ve ever come across. Do was born in Los Angeles to parents who had left Laos for the United States in 1975. Do never studied film; she studied ballet and cosmetology, and she eventually worked in Italy as a teacher at a ballet school and a makeup artist for theater and film productions. In 2010, she and her husband, Christopher Larsen, moved to Laos to take care of Do’s father, intending for the move to be temporary.
Neither of them had filmmaking experience, but Larsen had worked at a film school in Italy and was interested in being a screenwriter. He was also curious about Laos’ nascent film industry. The couple went to the very first Laotian film festival—they were invited by, in Do’s words, “this random white dude we met in a café”—and there met the filmmakers of the production company Lao Art Media. The company guys were—again, in Do’s words—“fucking plastered,” and drunkenly invited the couple to stop by their office and talk about making movies.
Likely because they were fucking plastered, the Lao Art Media producers hadn’t really understood that Larsen was an aspiring screenwriter who didn’t have any directing experience, nor did he have much interest in directing. In the ultimate Wife Guy moment, Larsen told them his wife could so totally direct a movie. Do, who was presumably sitting right next to him when he said this, was extremely surprised to be volunteered as a film director, as she was—I cannot stress this enough—technically still employed as a ballet teacher in Italy and currently on a leave of absence for family reasons. They fought about it, but Do went and read Michael Rabiger’s classic film textbook Directing: Film Techniques and Aesthetics, sat in on some acting classes, and made a movie.
That movie was Chanthaly (2013), which Do filmed entirely in their house in Vientiane. It’s based on the ballet Giselle, and it’s the first horror movie to come out of Laos. Do is frank about the fact that she and Larsen had pretty low expectations; it was a way for them to learn filmmaking, and they never expected it to screen anywhere outside of a very limited showing in Vientiane. It was made for a Laotian audience, with the Laotian government censors in mind. But it did reach an international audience; Chanthaly had a North American premiere at Fantastic Fest in 2013. You can watch Chanthaly on Do’s YouTube page, and probably other places as well, as Do and Larsen released it into the public domain as part of their crowdsourcing campaign to raise funds for their second movie, Dearest Sister (2016).
Dearest Sister, a horror thriller about a young woman from the countryside who goes to take care of a wealthy family member in Vientiane, was also a success. It secured international distribution, received positive press around the festival circuit, and in 2017 was chosen by Laos as its first-ever submission in the Academy Awards foreign language category. In addition to being financed by crowdsourcing, Dearest Sister was an international co-production with companies in France and Estonia.
That, more than anything, is a sign that Laotian filmmakers are working hard to claim the spotlight. The money and training is still coming from elsewhere—from anywhere filmmakers can get it—but they are pushing to have more Laotian talent making more Laotian stories. As director Anysay Keola said in an interview with the Locarno Film Festival, the Laotian filmmaking community is still very small, with unique challenges in terms of how they reach their audience and how they have to navigate government censorship. The whole system is very dependent on hustling for international support and utilizing multinational expertise, but the industry is growing, and people are paying attention.
With the extra attention comes extra criticism, often from people in the film world who couldn’t find Laos on a map if their lives depended on it. Do has spoken about how many people—particularly white Westerners—reacted to Dearest Sister with a depressing but unsurprising degree of cultural ignorance about Laos. Dearest Sister takes place in a very wealthy corner of Vientiane society, one that outsiders, whose only conception of Laos comes from tourism advertisements of impoverished and exotic villages, had no idea existed and weren’t interested in acknowledging. If it didn’t match their idea of what a poor Southeast Asian country looked like, because the clothes and cars were too nice, or because the characters were too clever and worldly, then it didn’t count as real Southeast Asian horror.
There are of course important conversations to be had about the differences between the stories told by people who grow up in a culture and those told by members of the diaspora, or those told in conjunction with foreigners. From every article and interview I’ve read, it’s obvious that Laotian filmmakers are having those conversations. It’s an issue that is foremost in their minds as they work to tell their stories in their own way. They are well aware of the complications that arise when their money comes from Europe and their production crews come from Thailand and their most globally recognized filmmaker is an American-born woman who moved to Laos as an adult. Building a film tradition from the ground up is not an easy task, and the prevailing sentiment seems to be: “We are doing this our way, not your way, even if you don’t like it, and we are using every resource we can get our hands on.”
And The Long Walk is a film that grew directly out of those bad-faith criticisms from outsiders.
Note: There are a lot of spoilers for The Long Walk from this point forward. I offer this warning because it’s a film that benefits from going in without knowing that much. But I’m not your mom. You can spoil yourselves if you want to.
About the origin of The Long Walk, Do said in an interview, “I was just like, ‘Okay, fine. Let’s give you your poor, sad brown folk, let’s give you your little hut and dirt road. Here’s some Asian mysticism. It’s true, we believe in it … but it’s going to be done on my terms. So like, fuck you! It’s a [time travel] serial killer movie now.’”
The Long Walk takes place in some ambiguous near-future where people have implanted microchips that contain identification, tracking, and financial information, but technological advancements don’t make much difference in the lives of those living in rural Laos. There is a city full of skyscrapers visible in the distance, but in this countryside village the roads are unpaved, poverty is commonplace, and a house’s electricity might come from a car battery hooked up to a single solar panel. Tourists and NGO workers pass through cluelessly without changing much. Everybody knows everybody else but that doesn’t automatically lead to connection. People flee to the city for a better life and never come back.
The setting is very limited, and the atmosphere is incredible. Cinematographer Matthew Macar isn’t doing much that’s very fancy here, as everything is slow and understated by design, but he sure does get a lot of impact out of repeated shots of a young woman standing on the same road in different contexts.
The first character we meet is the Old Man (played by Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy). Very few of the characters have names. The Old Man makes his meager living by scavenging things from around his dilapidated home. We watch him collect parts from an old motorcycle in the woods, and we see that there is a very obvious human skeleton on the ground just a few feet away. When the Old Man heads into town to sell the motorcycle parts, he places a small offering on a roadside shrine.
As he walks along the dirt road, a young woman walks besides him. The Girl (Noutnapha Soydara) is completely silent, but the Old Man talks to her, remarking that they’ve been walking together for fifty years but she’s never said a word. She can’t be any older than her early twenties, so it doesn’t take long to figure out that she’s a ghost. This is Soydara’s first film role, and she does an amazing job as a character who communicates almost entirely by gesture and expression. Some of her expressions are very eloquent.
The Old Man sells his scavenged goods to a shopkeeper who gossips about the missing owner of a noodle shop across the road. (Context: 400,000 Lao kip is about $18.) Then the man returns home—the Girl stops outside the gate—where we learn that he has an old woman locked up inside his house. We’ve found the missing owner of the noodle shop.
The woman is dead and lying in a pull of blood; she has used an exposed nail in the room to kill herself. The Old Man buries her nearby while her own ghost watches. She, too, is silent, but the man talks to her and reassures her that she’ll be safe here, and she won’t be alone.
This sequence of events is an eerie and disorienting way to open a movie. The pacing is extremely measured, the tone solemn, the lighting deliberately scant. When it’s night, the darkness is suffocating. Every scene is filled with long silences and deep shadows in which a great deal is left unexplained and unrevealed.
I suspect your reaction to the movie depends a great deal on how much patience you have with this sort of storytelling. I happen to love it, particularly when the tension rises so subtly I don’t notice until I’m already clenching my teeth and trying not to blink. That’s what happens here, for the movie’s full runtime. I think the film deserves a patient viewing, one that lets the scenes flow without explanation for a while. The film opens with death—the Girl and her skeleton in the woods—and death is suffused throughout, completely inescapable; there is a relentless build of very quiet tension that never lets us get used to it.
Right from the start, instead of giving us a chance to orient ourselves to the murderer and his ghosts, the film instead twists to introduce us to the Boy (Por Silatsa). This is the Old Man fifty years ago, on the day the Girl was struck by a vehicle on the road and left to die alone in the woods. The Boy finds her and holds her hand while she dies, which seems like a sweet moment until we realize that he’s going to just… leave her there. He takes a photo and money from her suitcase. He doesn’t tell anyone about her, doesn’t fetch his parents or the authorities, and most egregiously doesn’t ever give her the opportunity to be cremated so that her spirit might move on.
Laos is a predominantly Buddhist country, and this is a very Buddhist film. Just as importantly, Laos is also a country where a great many people maintain animist folk beliefs right along the practice of Buddhism. The belief that spirits can interact with the living is common (as it is in most of the world), and customs are built around treating those spirits well. Corpses must be cremated and the ashes scattered so that the spirits of the dead can be reincarnated.
The Old Man claims he doesn’t let the Girl or the women he kills move on because he doesn’t know what awaits them, as though he’s doing them a favor, but that’s a lie. He knows what the right thing to do is—and so does the audience. The true horror in this story comes from his refusal to let the spirits go. When Lina (Vilouna Phetmany) comes to the village in search of her mother, the Old Man pretends to help her, knowing all the while where he buried the woman who died by suicide while locked up in his home. He knows her mother’s ghost is just outside. He does nothing about it until he is forced to.
This is haunting as imprisonment, haunting as control, with silent, nameless women trapped by a man who insists on telling them, and himself, that it’s for their own good.
The most chilling moment in the film is when the Boy meets the Girl’s mother on the road. She is desperately searching for her runaway daughter, and she has heard the Girl might be haunting this road. All the mother wants is to find her daughter’s body in order to give her a funeral and let her move on. While the mother is pleading, the Girl is standing right beside the boy, silent and watchful. There is no real hope in her expression; she already knows how this will play out. The Boy looks at images of the Girl when she was alive and is unmoved. He tells the mother nothing. When the parents have gone, all he says to the Girl is, “I didn’t know you had a dog.”
When the Boy is first introduced, it looks like it might be a flashback explaining how the Old Man and the Girl met. But we quickly learn that it’s not that at all, because the Old Man and the Boy can interact. That’s where the time travel comes in. The Girl can bring them through time, both forward and backward. The visual cues to signify stepping through time are subtle: lanterns versus lights, cigarettes versus vape, fields that are tended versus overgrown. When their interactions influence the Boy’s choices, we see the consequence reflected in the Old Man’s present in different ways, some of which are subtle and unsettling, and some of which are outright horrifying.
Do has said she and Larsen looked at a lot of time travel stories to figure out what structure to use. They very much wanted changes in the past to be reflected in the future, without the future having any memory of the changes; she namechecks both Back to the Future (1985) and Primer (2004) as part of their research. Critics have similarly namechecked La Jetée (1962), and while I don’t know if Do and Larsen ever watched it, I think it’s unlikely that a couple of people who sat down to learn how to make movies in the 2000s wouldn’t have at least heard of it. I also got some vibes of Timecrimes (2007), because both films present time travel as a spiraling escalation of violence and horrors as a man who is already doing bad things keeps doing more bad things to reshape his world.
(Note: On all three of their movies, Larsen is the credited screenwriter and Do is the credited director, but in interviews they talk about how they develop the stories together before he writes the screenplay.)
Even though there are a lot of familiar elements in the time travel, the ghost story, and the crime story, the way The Long Walk blends them together leads to a film that is wonderfully strange, dark, and unique. The spiraling nature of the time travel isn’t just a structural choice; it leads, in its bleak, meandering way, directly to the heart of the story.
At the end, when the Girl finally speaks, she reveals that she has been ferrying the Old Man across time for countless lifetimes, always hoping that he will finally make better choices, stop killing woman and imprisoning their spirits, and let her go. He never does. He never lets go of the guilt and grief he feels about his mother’s death, regardless of whether he had a hand in it or not. He never lets go of his anger at being abused and abandoned as a child. Everything he holds on to festers inside of him, forming a rotten core that is never excised. He never lets the Girl’s spirit move on, because he never believes that her ability to reincarnate is more important than his self-imposed loneliness. He never stops filling his mother’s favorite flower field with the spirits of women who stand in silence and watch him grow up and grow old again and again and again.
Time loop stories are often about a character trying again and again to fix something, to get something right. But usually the character is aware of the loop, or becomes aware of it, and that knowledge becomes part of the lesson. That isn’t the case here—at least not in the same way, because this is a film with a Buddhist perspective on reincarnation deep in its bones. It doesn’t matter what the Old Man tells himself about not knowing what comes next for the women’s spirits. He is doing monstrous things in this life and every life, and he is always justifying them to himself, and he does not stop. That’s the cycle in which he has trapped himself and the Girl.
I love this movie. I had no idea what to expect when I watched it. I went in knowing nothing more than “time travel and ghosts,” and I haven’t stopped thinking about it ever since. It’s a film with equal amounts of empathy and horror, with a very distinctive perspective, and an almost oppressively mournful style. If Do’s goal in making this film was a defiant “Fuck you!” to the Western critics demanding their own version of Laotian stories, she has succeeded marvelously. It’s bleak and unsettling and unique. It gets under your skin. I will be thinking about it for a long time.
What do you think of The Long Walk? In an interview, Do mentioned that she and Larsen actually disagree on where the Old Man dies at the ending of the film—whether it’s before or after he burns the house down. I can see it either way, and like that it’s ambiguous. What do you think?
Next week: And now for something completely different, but still about loneliness and guilt and grief, with the New Zealand post-apocalypse film The Quiet Earth. Watch it on Hoopla, Kanopy, Amazon, Roku, and more.[end-mark]
The post <i>The Long Walk</i>: Grief, Guilt, and the Inescapable Weight of the Past appeared first on Reactor.
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