This old man (Yannawoutthi Chantalungsy), he wanders the locality here in the Laotian countryside, picking up scrap to sell and scrape a living with. It is the future, where the government has decreed that everyone should have chips implanted in their bodies to make tracking them (for their safety), financial transactions and communications far easier, though the old man has an early version of this that is practically out of date in comparison to the up to the minute creations available now. But he is tied to his past, and the tragedy that happened as a boy he feels shaped the man he became, something he lives with every day thanks to an ability he discovered early on: he can talk to the dead, and has a frequent spectral companion...
Nothing to do with the long in development Stephen King book adaptation, this was a different long walk, more of a metaphorical than a literal one but with a philosophical angle that quickly develops into an anti-nostalgia about the past that creates the future. The old man (never named) has channelled his ability to communicate with the other side for a good reason: they're dead because he made them that way. It started when he was a boy (Por Silatsa) and struggling domestically with an infirm mother and a drunken, violent father; he happened upon a teenage girl who had crashed her motorbike at the side of the road and was dying, hidden in the bushes. As he kept her company in her last moments, at her request, he discovered a new talent.
The old and young versions of this character are often in contact and discuss their situation and the old incarnation's belief he can make things better, giving himself a better life in the process. Naturally, the opposite of this occurs, as the more he exerts on his missions to liberate the souls of the grievously ill, the harder his heart becomes, and as a portrait of obsession curdling the nobler reasons they began, director Mattie Do and her frequent collaborator, writer Christopher Larsen's efforts here may not lay all their cards on the table straight away, and more science fiction than horror, but they did allow the mysteries to be gradually revealed until a rather unlovely picture became apparent. This all played out over the sunbleached rural landscapes of Laos, not the first nation to spring to mind when thinking of science fiction epics, even one as idiosyncratic as this.
There was, in fact, a lot going on here and at times it was difficult to fathom what we should be prioritising in our understanding of the plot, never mind the increasingly hard to work out old man. We wonder if he cannot see where he is going wrong - is he too entranced by his superpower that he is compelled to use it no matter what? In the latter stages, he appears to be keeping a young woman hostage, to the point of cutting off her pinkie finger as punishment when she tried to flee him, and he quickly looks like a monster, as we twig he has been a monster all this time. But he wasn't that twisted when he was a little boy, and the message appeared to be nobody starts out planning to be evil, there's a stage where you could go either way, and that could arise when you are moving from the innocence of childhood to the more emotionally hardened state of adulthood. Certainly that's what has happened to the old man, and this languidly paced enigma may take its own sweet time in drawing that conclusion, but stick with it and it weaves a spell. Music by Anthony Weeden.
[The Long Walk will be available on Digital Download from 28th February 2022.]
