From the opening strains of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ gloriously fragile soundtrack we know we’re in for something special here.
It may be a bleak, apocalyptic and frequently terrifying trip but in John Hillcoat’s (Ghosts of the Civil Dead, The Proposition) adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer prize winning novel, there is a tender, yet never sentimental, core which drives us on through some of the most harrowing scenes of social degradation of any major American cinema since that of the 70s.
This is anti-Emmerich filmmaking. Forget all the other Hollywood Apocalypse movies.
Here McCarthy and Hillcoat are interested on a macro-level at how a society cut adrift from everything but the raw desire for survival functions, but also, affectingly, on a micro-level how the bonds between father and son fare under such incredible pressure.
After an unexplained cataclysmic event, an un-named man (Viggo Mortenson) sets out on the titular Road with his young son to search for a place of safety in an increasingly savage and inhospitable world. Hillcoat manages to conjure a world at once bruisingly threatening yet full of humanity in his allegorical tale of Armageddon. As with the best of science-fiction, this is a cinema of ideas – and it’s interesting to note just how much of it was filmed in the wake of the social and material devastation of post-Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.