The Long Walk: Languid Laotian Time-Travelling Ghost Story Brings Quiet Thrills
By Karen Gordon
Rating: B
A man walks down a gravel country road outside a village in Laos. Along with him is a young woman. They’ve been walking on this road between his home and the small nearby town for 50 years. And yet he’s aged while she’s stayed the same. They communicate, but she’s never said a word.
This is the setting for writer/director Mattie Do’s poetic and enigmatic The Long Walk, a movie that crosses genres in a multi-layered exploration of grief and guilt, and the ways in which past traumas shape us.
Set in the near future, Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy, known only as The Old Man, is a stoic loner, still living in his family’s run-down wooden house on the outskirts of a small village. He ekes out a living as a scavenger.
The locals are suspicious of him: Some have seen him walking with a young woman, The Girl (Noutnapha Soydara). They believe she’s a ghost and that he has the ability to speak to the dead. She is indeed a ghost, but for the Old Man, The Girl will also become a guide of sorts.
The Girl has been with him since he was a boy about nine years old (Por Silatsa). He found her, still alive, gravely wounded, and stayed with her until she died. After that, she started showing up, waiting for him on the road just outside the gate, or meeting up with him along that gravel road, walking with him, sometimes happily eating oranges, and even holding his hand, but never speaking.
In what at first are flashbacks, we see The Boy, quiet and watchful, spending time with his beloved mother (Chanthamone Inoudome) as she harvests a modest crop and sells it or tries to sell it to help support the family. She is already ill, and ultimately dies of tuberculosis as the boy tends to her. Watching her suffer marked him and set him a particular life course that haunts him.
The Old Man figures out that The Girl can help him travel back in time. He decides that he wants to go back to a few months before his mother’s illness and death and try to save her or relieve her suffering. What started as flashbacks merge with the main story, as The Old Man visits and interacts with The Boy, without either telling the other who he is. But each time The Old Man returns to the present, things in his life have changed, as does our perception of who he might be, and what he’s done.
With its languid pace, rural setting, and natural beauty, The Long Walk is not your typical ghost story. And yet, as it goes on, it becomes increasingly darker. We question what we’ve previously thought. What’s rattles here aren’t the short sharp turns of conventional Hollywood horror, but the way the minor changes in the past affect the present. Who was The Old Man and what has he become? Is it generosity or something else that compels him?
The Long Walk is the third film by American-Lao filmmaker Do. She’s a meticulous filmmaker who has plotted out a film that slips and slides through time, leaving us to figure out where we are and perhaps why.
That technique is both one of the film’s strengths and weaknesses. It’s hypnotic and engaging. The mood is languid and almost meditative. But to fully understand all its parts, the film would no doubt benefit from at least a second viewing.
Do — who was raised in Los Angeles but moved back to Laos where she’s lived now for many years —is steeped in the country’s complex history. She is using her film to explore the effects of colonization on the people of Laos. But unless you’re aware of the history of the country, the references may not be evident.
What is evident is that Do is a formidable and exciting director with a distinct vision, who has made a layered film that unfolds in a slow, steady, and patient way, asking questions about the deeper and darker pieces of the human psyche.
The Long Walk. Written and directed by Mattie Do. Starring Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy, Noutnapha Soydara, Por Silatsa and Chanthamone Inoudome. Now available on digital and VOD.