The Road Preview

We began watching the end of the world 50 years ago but in the first decade of the twenty-first century filmmaker's apocalyptic fantasies were overtaken by media-mediated fear. Movies magnified the scale of the terror and the destructive spectacle, but with 9/11, climate change, global recession and untreatable pandemics stoking our pre-heated millenarian anxiety, the real world was ahead of the curve: the bad stuff was already out there.

I Am Legend and 28 Days Later were thrilling examples of existential exploitica, but viral mutation and hungry post-humans were minor intimations of the horror ahead. John Hillcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel 'The Road' starts at the end of the line and then sinks through several new circles of hell. It isn't designed, as apocalyptic art often is, to prompt a rapturous response to the awful truth or to signal to audiences that we've picked the right side in a Manichean brawl. The Road has no conventional politics. It's a fable stripped almost entirely of hope. Hillcoat follows McCarthy's godforsaken vision to create a relentless, colourless, dirge of a film that goes nowhere and doesn't come back. The single chink of light in a story from which even the sun has been banished: The Road is a brutally intense account of the will to survive in a world where survival is the least preferable option of all.

It begins with the arrival of an undisclosed cataclysm and the unseen onset of anarchy. The clocks stop at 1.17 and for Viggo Mortensen and his pregnant wife (names have ceased to matter) it really is the end of time. "Within a year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting," runs Mortensen's dream-like opening narration. "The screams of the murdered... the dead impaled on spikes along the road... Cannibalism, that was the great fear."

Eight years on from the end and Mortensen's wife (Charlize Theron) has committed suicide leaving father and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) to walk, without clear purpose, towards the south of the country and the sea. Hillcoat drops in a couple of flashbacks to the aftermath of the disaster, but the sense is merely of stepping out of one nightmare and into another. "Other families are doing it," says Theron, fingering the revolver that will eventually help her out.