Sometimes, the emotional weight we carry is just too heavy. It is for Walden Dean, the beleaguered court stenographer in writer/director Mick Davis’s new suspense thriller Walden. After discovering he has been diagnosed with a terminal illness, Walden comes undone. He’s witnessed myriad injustices in the courtroom, and now he can’t keep his emotions in check. Suddenly, his repressed anger is unleashed, and Walden takes justice into his own hands — in the most gruesome ways imaginable.

The horror thriller stars Emile Hirsch in a career-defining performance, along with Shane West (The Dirty South, Nikita), Kelli Garner, Tania Raymonde, and David Keith. Writer/director Mick Davis, who said the stars aligned with this film, shared more about the production, particularly Hirsch’s commanding performance, in this MovieWeb exclusive.

On Emile Hirsch’s Transformation

Emile Hirsch was recently seen in the horror comedy Helen’s Dead and has made a dent in films like Into the Wild and Dig. In Walden, the actor loses himself in the role, delivering a knock-out performance. Mick Davis marveled at how precise Hirsch was and determined to create a fully realized and troubled character. “I got surprised by moments where Emile would pull things out of the hat from just nowhere,” Davis said, adding:

“I knew when I met him that he was perfect for the role because of his demeanor and the way he approaches the process. He just embraced the character of Walden from the minute he got the script. We had a conversation about the [character’s] accent and the way he should behave. I told him, ‘I want you to imagine yourself as a Pillsbury Doughboy with a bowtie. If anybody prodded your tummy, you would just chuckle or smile, because that’s your nature in this story. Then of course, as the story progresses, you become something else.’ And he loved that. He took it and ran with it.”

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They agreed that Walden believes he’s justified in doing what he’s doing, and that nobody would do it. That initial conversation led to the topic of society, and when people are being hurt on the street, others pull their phones out and film it. “No one goes to help, no one crosses the street to help someone, but they will film it and ‘ooh and ah’ as they’re watching it,” he said. Davis continued:

“And I said [to Emile], ‘Your character has probably been sitting in that courtroom, just watching everything for all those years, as did your father and grandfather, and you’ve accumulated all this pain. So it must get to a point that you either have to find love so that your mind is distracted and you can focus on a proper life, or sadly you find out something is wrong with you, and that’s when you say to yourself, ‘Okay, I’m not going to sit there anymore watching what’s going on. I’m going to do something about it.’ But the integrity of the character must always remain.”

Confronting Big Challenges
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In something that’s bound to increase the creep factor for audiences, the character of Walden is mindful and minds his manners. He’s a Southern gentleman, even when he’s plotting horrible atrocities. “The beauty of the character is that even when he does what he does, he still addresses people with manners,” Davis said, adding:

For me, the best anti-heroes and best dark characters are like Hannibal Lecter, for instance. He is so compelling to watch because his command of the language is so beautiful that you forget for a moment that he’s a cannibal.

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Shane West plays a cop in Walden, alongside Tania Raymonde. Kelli Gardner’s character, Emily, and David Keith’s judge add deeper layers to the story. The film’s last half intensifies, delivering a worthy horror suspense thriller. Davis said the entire production was full of “spinning plates.”

“There are a few twists and turns from characters, that we never believed they would be what they became,” he shared, noting that trying to maintain the creative nuances of the characters and the story was very challenging. “It was all about the nuance for each of the characters. I wanted to do something that felt timeless. It could be To Kill a Mockingbird, it could be back in Gone with the Wind. It just had to be in a place where the clock had stopped. But the nuance was so important as the characters progressed.”

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He said he loved that the film showed Walden for what he is, and that the elevator scene with Kelli Garner, playing his love interest, was supposed to be shot on a flatbed in a car driving around the streets. “I was looking at the elevator and I thought to myself, ‘You know what, I’m not going to do the car drive, I’m actually going to go inside the elevator and create claustrophobia for Walden and have Kelli’s character impose herself, a strong woman, trying to find out what this man is all about.’

“Because the audience is asking at that point, ‘Who is this guy?’” Davis added. “And I felt she was the audience at that point. I loved the nuance between the two of them in the elevator. There was almost something sensual going on between them. That showed the real progression and nuance of the character for me.”

Walden opens in theaters November 10, and on demand and digital December 12, 2023.