The Road - movie review

I was forewarned about The Road.

Let me explain. A few months back, I was lucky enough to interview Viggo Mortensen in front of a captive audience, and my reliable panic switch kicked in about a week beforehand. In order to combat the rising fumes of terror at the prospect that I might fumble and not know his favorite breed of horse or whether he preferred his sandwiches cut into halves or triangles, I began scouring the internet for every bit of information on the man I could find. And unfortunately, this led me to stumble across a blazingly spoiler-ridden synopsis of The Road. Everything I read in that illicit paragraph terrified me. I assumed that as I knew what I was in store for, I'd be somewhat buffered against the atrocities I was about to witness.

I was profoundly wrong.

Based on the terrifying novel by Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men), whose genius is offset by his staggering pessimism, The Road is a post-apocalyptic fable - although the term 'fable' conjures up ill deserved quantities of whimsy and lesson learning. What we're actually getting here is a cold, brutal slab of hypothetical reality - or, at least, a potential reality in which every finger on every button has been pressed, and damn the consequences.

A father and son, played respectively by Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-Mcphee, are hiking across what remains of the American midwest in an effort to reach the coast. Most of humanity has been scoured from the face of the earth (which, incidentally, is decaying and freezing to death; massive, shattered, calcifying forests and broken husks of buildings pepper the landscape), and most survivors have resorted to cannibalism, rape, and other unspeakable animalistic acts. None of this is shied away from, and the horror of what people are capable of is depicted with a sterile bluntness. Even implied atrocities - meat hooks glistening with blood, raw red streaks in the snow, or the distant screams of someone being mutilated are terribly real. The father and son hunker down and are assailed with cloying, gnawing dread, which we're forced to share with them. I didn't want to relate, or draw comparisons, or empathise, but their plight was so human that I couldn't help it.

One of the hardest things to watch is the suicide motif manifesting itself repeatedly throughout the film. It's actually stated at one point that many families have been committing group suicide, and father and son actually stumble upon one such family early in the film. The father carries a revolver with two bullets in it, once for himself, and one for his son. Both are ready to kill themselves in a predetermined manner, and when crises start flying at them with increasing intensity, the prospect of suicide seems incredibly logical. When the father asks an old dying man, played by Robert Duvall, whether he'd kill himself, the man responds by pointing out that suicide is a luxury people can't afford with the world in its present state. The father and son, however, doggedly insist that they are the 'good guys', and that they're 'carrying the fire'. It's nauseating and revelatory being buffeted between wanting them to survive, and wanting them to die just so they can be released from such a torturous existence, and several people in the same screening as myself had to excuse themselves during some of the more harrowing parts of the film.

The performances are pitch perfect, and the plot flits between the terrifying present, and the almost idyllic past, back when their wife/mother, played by Charlize Theron, was alive. The Road even begins with a small army of saccharine snapshots of what life used to be; flowers, swaying grass, Viggo nuzzling absent mindedly against the nose of a horse. The part of my brain which has been assailed by films like The Day After Tomorrow (I have a thing for Jake Gyllenhaal. Don't judge me) expected survivors to band together, to form some kind of resistance. Instead, humans literally revert back into animals. Even the father, who has managed to imbue his son with a profoundly touching and stalwart moral compass, teeters dangerously close to losing his humanity on several occasions, when confronted by other lone stragglers. And instead of vast CGI landscapes exploding or collapsing, the film is a sequence of washed out shots of dead landscapes, occasionally interrupted by entire forests collapsing due to entropy off in the distance.

The Road is careful not to explain exactly how the end of the world went down, or who perpetrated it, but to delve into the desperate, harrowing depths people will sink to when robbed of everything. It's a vital, touching and terrifying piece of cinema, and whilst it isn't an easy watch, I haven't been able to stop rolling it around in my brain since it finished. I'm looking forward to being able to sleep properly over the coming weeks.

The Road opens in cinemas on January 28, 2010.
You can view The Road movie trailer here on TheVine.