WOULD you want to survive a disaster that wiped out virtually all life, that blocked out the sun, layered the planet in a blanket of ash and ended human civilisation as we know it?
Cormac McCarthy’s answer in his post-apocalyptic novel The Road is, probably yes, so long as you had someone else to live for. John Hillcoat’s brilliantly shot film of the book makes much of the author’s celebration of human compassion in the midst of horror, which is just as well since without it the story’s backdrop would be overwhelmingly dismal.
The film follows the journey of a man and his son some years after an environmental catastrophe has destroyed everything – we are never told what happened. The pair are travelling south through the abandoned and devastated US, hoping to find the good guys, people like them. Along the way they scavenge for food and try to avoid the bad guys, who won’t hesitate to kill even a child for food. In this world of struggle, grim images abound: corpses of people who died in their beds, a group of terrified, starving, naked people kept in a cellar by an armed gang.
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The Road is appropriate to our apocalypse-fearing era, a study of human nature and the psychology of survival when there is nothing to hope for. This is what makes the appearance of a solitary beetle towards the movie’s end, rising up from the boy’s hands like some angel of expectation, a touch disappointing. It is hard to believe McCarthy would have stomached such sentimentality.