Yes, there are spoilers ahead, so walk with caution!
I saw a ton of movies in 2025, a personal record, in fact, but one that I missed was The Long Walk from director Francis Lawrence, based on a novel by Stephen King. After a long 10-month wait for the movie to hit a streaming service, I was finally able to watch it with my HBO Max subscription. First, I loved it. I mean, “love” sounds like a weird way to describe a movie this hard to watch and this dark and disturbing, but I enjoyed it way more than I was anticipating. I loved it all except for one part. I almost had to turn it off when one of the characters breaks his ankle.
I Had A Visceral Reaction
If you've seen the movie, you know that The Long Walk is a brutal movie. Set in some sort of dystopian timeline (the time period is purposefully left open), the film follows a group of 50 young men as they walk until they die. Along the way, one by one, 49 of the 50 are picked off until one winner remains. We get to know about 10 of the walkers, including Richard Harkness, played by Jordan Gonzalez.
Somewhere around the 60-mile mark, in one of the most harrowing scenes in the movie, following the guys up a steep hill, Harkness turns his ankle and either breaks it or severely sprains it. For the next 10 miles, he essentially walks on the side of his foot. Even as I write this, my stomach is churning. I can’t think of anything more painful than that, because I have a long history of spraining my ankle. When I first saw it happen (which I knew was coming), I almost reached for my remote control.
I Felt The Pain In A Very Real Way
It’s not too much to say that I have a slight case of PTSD when it comes to sprained and broken ankles. I relive the moments I did the same thing, and seeing it as starkly and as brutally as it’s shown in The Long Walk was really hard to watch, even though I’d been warned before watching. I spent the spend the first 30 minutes of the movie waiting for it, which added to my stress.
When I was in high school, I severely sprained my left ankle, playing golf of all things. I was in a brace for months, tearing multiple ligaments. In my late 20s, I did the same thing to my right ankle after stepping in a hole in an alley in Boston, walking (sober-ish) out of a bar. I was on my way to a wedding, and I basically ignored getting the injury looked at. In fact, I never did. Instead, I limped around for months like an idiot.
Neither ankle has ever been the same, and for many years, I was prone to rolling one or the other, until I really concentrated on strengthening both. I don’t roll them much anymore, and when I do, the pain, while intense, is usually short-lived. However, I’m incredibly sensitive to seeing ankle injuries in sports and in movies and TV. I really feel it when I see it. I can still remember the sound both ankles made, and I’ll tell you, movies are really good at recreating that sound.
Sadly, Harkness succumbs to the injury and “gets his ticket,” and thankfully there are only a couple of really graphic shots of this ankle before he’s shot, but they were definitely the hardest moments of a bleak movie for me to watch.
