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The makers of The Road faced high expectations from readers stunned by Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 prose-poem novel. They also had to make a quiet, mournful film about The End of the World appealing to audiences overstimulated by disaster porn. Luckily, The Road succeeds enough on both counts to make it well worth traveling.

[The following is a re-edited REPRINT of the redblog review of The Road on its theatrical release last fall. The Road is now on DVD and available for rental from redbox.]

An unnamed, unexplained cataclysm has knocked civilization so far back on its heels that years later the cities lie in dust, most people and animals are gone, and the crumbling roadways are roamed by gangs looking for whatever food they can find, even from—especially from–once-taboo sources. Across this landscape of ash and decay we follow a Man (Viggo Mortensen) and his Boy (young newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee).

Adapted by director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) and playwright Joe Penhall from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road slowly pulls you down into a scorched world of monotonous survival. The film isn’t running to show you the way to a happy ending, it’s asking you to trudge that road with the worn-down pair, to share their constant fear, their struggle to find a reason why living and moving on is preferable to not doing either. And it does so with a grimly beautiful, sparse style that depicts unblinking cruelty while matching McCarthy’s stoic, solitary language of self-reliance.

This is not the whoopee disaster porn of 2012 or the tough-guy excitement of post-apocalyptic action flicks like The Road Warrior or Zombieland–films whose great sin (varied quality aside) is perpetuating the dangerous delusion that The End of the World as We Know It will be an exciting, ennobling adventure that will reward the strong and the righteous. But after watching The Road, you’ll feel a little sicker to your stomach and soul at the idea of enjoying another “fun” Apocalyptic flick.

The Coen Brothers cracked the McCarthy novel-to-film code with the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men, but to his credit Hillcoat isn’t trying to out-Coen the Coens. His direction is restrained to the point of near invisibility, purposely lost amid images of washed-out horizons and set to the minor-key piano and violin of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.

But best of all Hillcoat has preserved the novel’s fable-like tone. Despite its unflinching honesty about the horrors of this world, The Road still feels like a mournful tale passed down from a terrifyingly barren future. And like the Coens, he’s captured some of McCarthy’s near-magical ability to transform minute details into epic morality plays.

Along the way, McCarthy’s underlying Biblical themes are also maintained. The Man’s Old-Testament ruthlessness and selfishness means he does what it takes to preserve his tribe, his remaining family. (The Boy’s mother, played by Charlize Theron, is shown in heartrending flashbacks to have already taken the easy way out.) Despite his painfully pragmatic need to teach the Boy how to use the last bullet in their gun on himself, the Man repeatedly insists they are “carrying the fire” of not just civilization, but human goodness. He’s just not sure if he believes it himself.

It’s hard not to be drawn in by the sunken, haunted weariness of Mortensen’s face, especially when he’s doing some of the best quiet, understated work of a long career built on quiet, understated work. Mortensen’s laconic strength has always well served the hero who knows how unlikely a happy ending is, and yet keeps pushing ahead.

The Boy is something different, born into this world and portrayed by Smit-McPhee as a vessel of both innocence and apprehension. The Boy yearns to show and share the generosity and compassion his desolate world has stripped away from its grown-ups, and the numerous references to him as an angel as well as the word of God only underscore his New Testament leanings. The Man insists the cataclysm has reduced the world to a stark dichotomy: they are the Good Guys, but he doesn’t have the luxury of always acting like one. The Boy does and so represents some sort of frail future promise, shielded by the Man’s paranoia and protectiveness.

The Man frantically steers them clear of human contact, “community” having devolved into something brutal and harrowing. It’s the Boy who seeks out others—fellow travelers on the road such as the great Robert Duvall and Michael Williams from The Wire–wanting to trust and forgive them as embers of civilization rather than threats. And on a second viewing of The Road it’s easier to see past the horrors and sift from the ashes the film’s small moments of tenderness.

The Road offers a sort of cathartic solace in imagining a world, a life, an existence that is nearly unimaginable. It takes you as far down as it dares (some of the more heartbreaking and stomach-turning details from the novel have been sloughed off in the name of the most marginal of commercial appeal) and then asks, “now that you’re down here, what are you going to cling to?”

It’s exactly because The Road is so (mostly) uncompromisingly bleak and treads so close to the abyss that it’s all the more powerful and effective when it does let slip a tiny sliver of light–one that had been hidden away out of fear of it being seen and snuffed out. Obviously this sort of thing isn’t for everyone, but I for one relish how The Road uses the power of despair to invoke the hardest-earned hope.

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