Sometimes a ghost story is a love story more than it’s a tale of terror. We like to believe that if we love someone enough, they’ll never truly die, but stay with us for eternity, feeling no pain and never growing old. Isn’t that nice?

In a not too distant future, an old man (Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy) lives alone in a rural part of a village in Laos. He lives modestly, drying herbs and selling scrap metal he salvages from the jungle. And every day, he walks with the same woman (Noutnapha Soydara). The two first met when he was a small boy (Por Silatsa). In the intervening 50 years, she hasn’t spoken a word and hasn’t aged a day. But he knew that. After all, he was the one who found her on her own in the jungle, bleeding and beyond help.

He held her hand while she was dying, and the two have been friends ever since. Sometime as he’s growing up, the boy learns that ghosts occur when the dead aren’t given proper funerals. The spirits of the dead become lost, unable to move on. They continue to exist as they used to, never getting sick or old, but unable to move on, and unable to be seen by anyone except the boy/old man.

When the owner of the local noodle shop disappears, presumably having wandered off because of her advancing dementia, her daughter, Lina (Vilouna Phetmany) returns from the city to tie up loose ends and seek answers. Word that the old man sees spirits has gotten around, and she seeks closure he doesn’t want to give her. Just why that is slowly comes to light as the supernatural forces around the old man grow stronger, and he begins, with the aid of his ghost friend, to walk through time itself, and uncover truths about his ability that can change everything. For better or for worse.

If time travel isn’t your thing, you probably won’t like The Long Walk. It gets very twisty at times, and could be off-putting in that regard. There are also heavy themes of child abuse, intimate partner violence, and alcoholism that will be very hard to watch for some viewers. But these things are all used very well in the story and are vital to shaping the plot, so if you don’t mind them, I highly recommend giving The Long Walk two hours of your time. It’s a powerful story of love, fear of abandonment, and what can happen if we let our sense of compassion override our common sense and morality. From a folklore standpoint, it’s also a break from Western convention in its ghost lore that many will likely enjoy. The portrayal of ghosts and the afterlife in the film come from Buddhist beliefs, and it’s incredibly powerful.

The Long Walk is by no means a perfect movie, and some may find it a bit of a drag in places, but if you’re in the mood for something longer and more emotionally driven than your standard horror, then it’s well worth a watch.

8 out of 10