Cormac McCarthy’s highly acclaimed 2006 book about a father and son in a post-apocalyptic world has been brought to the screen by Australian director, John Hillcoat (The Proposition). He has taken the harsh sparseness and nightmarish world of the novel and created a cinematic vision.
To describe The Road as bleak is an understatement, the world inhabited by the Man (Viggo Mortensen, A History of Violence, Eastern Promises) and Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee, Romulus, My Father) is a hideous, twisted and distorted place, where the remaining humans are divided into the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’ with most in the latter camp. Cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe has created a look to this reality that is devoid of colour, using instead many shades of grey which feel cold and oppressive.
Following the Man and Boy as they try and reach the coast, the film establishes the everyday fight for survival. Getting food, when all the crops are gone and the animals dead, dodging gangs of survivors, whose methods may include cannibalism. The heart of the story is the connection between the father and son.
Adapted by Joe Penhall, the film has embellished some aspects of the book and censored others. With many long descriptive sections in the book, the film fills these gaps in action with flashbacks showing the Man’s wife, the Boy’s mother (Charlize Theron, Monster, In the Valley of Elah). However when it comes to some of the more horrific parts of the book, these have been watered down for the film, which never ramps up the complete destruction of civilisation to the same level imagined by McCarthy.
Read the full review at Trespass
