Oscillating between sci-fi, noir, horror and speculative fiction, Mattie Do’s The Long Walk is a bitter reflection on death's permanence and the lifelong grieving process. The Long Walk centers on an old man who can see and communicate with ghosts, desperately trying to return to the moment of his mother's death.
The Long Walk is a relatively contained story, only featuring a main cast of around four people, but it touches upon much more universal themes: what comes after death, regret, the chronology of time, and hauntings. The film's linearity begins to unfurl around the 30-minute mark. What begins as a mystery quickly turns towards the supernatural as we seemingly blend between concurrent realities of past and present.
After an old woman disappears in a rural Laoatian village, the old man is called upon by her daughter, Lina, to communicate with her missing, presumed dead mother. After initially rebuking her requests, he accepted payment and went to her house. Upon starting some kind of ritual, with objects held dear to the deceased, the lights begin to flicker. After a short while he writes down something on a piece of paper and requests it not be opened until he has left. Upon reading the envelope, there is just one note scrawled on a piece of paper, “your mother isn't here”.
The film is confrontational like this, no face is given to the dead or the bereaved, in a very blunt way, death, grief, is treated as something natural, something inevitable, inescapable. Interestingly, for a film centred around relationships with ghosts, the permanence of death is a key theme, the way that once you have crossed over, there is no coming back. The ghosts in the film don't speak; there is a clear barrier established between here and there.
The old man is accompanied by a ghost of a young woman, the same one that has been by his side since childhood, unable to speak, only watch. This ghost hovers on the edge of the frame, silently observing his actions. Their relationship, some unspoken companionship, she (the ghost) acting as some kind of guide to the supernatural. In the opening sequence, we see the old man cleaning up a dead body, altering it in some way; this is not explained or revisited, but after this act, through his ghost compainoin he can traverse time.
The film doesn't follow a singular narrative or consistent reality. After their initial meeting, Lina and the old man become not close, but frequent in each other's lives, almost as if we are watching from a perspective of a seemingly elliptical time. They appear to move in together and form some kind of partnership, all the while Lina waits to hear from her mother, while the old man tries to come to terms with his past.
The old man visits his childhood home, somehow preserved. Exploring this museum of self, he comes across an old porcelain doll, a part breaks off. Seemingly slipping into the past he is berated by his father, not knowing who this old man is. His father threatens and forces him to leave. While he runs, as if passing through time, the house becomes disheveled, a small piece of broken porcelain remains in his pocket as his father’s shout fades into the night.
A cabinet is broken, but we don't know when. According to the old man, it was not broken before, and yet Lina insists it has always been this way. We do not linger here. It is passed off as the old man aging, not remembering that he broke it a long time ago, something which we come to know is the truth just from a different time. Time folding in on itself, acts of the past slowly changing the present.
As the film progresses, it digs deeper into the recesses of grief and regret. A significant tonal shift comes once he has met his younger self (the young boy). We see the young boy meeting the ghost of the young woman for the first time, we learn that his mother is unwell, and that this is some kind of time loop, with the old man explaining that he too was visited by a stranger from the future as a child.
Lina is now restricted to the house, we only ever see her waking up, never going to sleep, and wearing new clothes each time, all is implied of her being held captive but not explicitly. It appears that the once morally grey intentions of the old man have changed in this present, his acts in the far past altering his actions in the recent past. As we follow the man, we do not see this happening, nor even implied, as we only see the self which is travelling time, not the old man in the [now] present.
One time we return to the present, Lina appears hurt, bruised and bloody, now missing a finger. This exploitation is the most overt of the whole film, we never see what happens in the present only the result, a trade, some kind of due to be paid for the old man's access to the supernatural, a price for the changes he is making in the past, an exploitation of another's body for one's own gain. It is clear now that for some purpose she is being held here and her body is being used, for his access to the past.
We see the man brew tea often, perhaps some ritual to help communing with the dead, perhaps a sedative for his prisoner, or medicine for his mother, often we return to him at this moment of repetition, now teaching the young boy his recipe. Upon giving this “medicine” to his mother, she dies, and the old man appears to have killed his ailing mother. We learn of his intention, to convince his younger self to bury his mother in this garden, so that he in the present can heal his infected wound and attain closure.
The small piece of porcelain is found again, implanted into Lina’s wrist, and she digs it out of a fresh wound.
We follow the young boy's perspective; he does not choose to follow his own instruction and instead chooses to leave his mother’s corpse where she lies. Discovered by a neighbour, the corpse is then cremated.
Returning to a forest filled with ghosts, standing motionless, silent, shoulder to shoulder in the dark, we hear the old man shouting. His mother isn't here, nor in the past or present, silence returns, and the inevitability of death, of time, of fate becomes apparent
The film culminates with Lina setting herself free, stabbing her captor in the leg. As the old man bleeds away, his younger self appears, time now seemingly happening in parallel. Disgusted by his own greed and beginning to understand what he has done in this new present, the old man locks his younger self in the house and burns it down.
As the old man begins to die, still accompanied by the ghost, he asks if they will be together in death, she shakes her head and walks into the forest. Returning to the point where they met, down the road to the young boy.
After finishing the film, I read a review that mentioned at a Q&A with Mattie Do, both Do, her producer and the moderator started crying and how that was really the only suitable response to the film. I think it was at that point I began to cry too.
It’s been hard to try and summarise the film in any sense, it encapsulates that yearning for change, for those who have gone to return, the feeling of perpetual grief, the feeling that never goes away.