Going nowhere

The Road
15, nationwide

The Road is based on Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel and, as far as roads go, this one is long, hard, brutal, pitiless and profoundly horrible, plus there doesn’t seem to be much reward for sticking with it. It is very much like the North Circular in all these respects, unless you count finally getting to Ikea as a reward, which no one in their right mind would. ‘The horror, the horror,’ as Joseph Conrad would surely have said, if he’d found himself in Ikea on a Saturday afternoon. He might also have added: ‘And the meatballs are rubbish,’ but we’ll just never really know.

But here? With this road? OK, here we have a father (Viggo Mortensen) and his 8-year-old son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) who appear to be among the last survivors of some unspecified cataclysm. We don’t know what disaster has struck — nuclear?; environmental? — only that it has, and now the earth is washed up, pretty much. The landscape is wrecked. Trees eerily creek and then crash to the ground. Random fires burn. An obscured sun casts a dingy, brown light. Everything is blanketed in a choking ash. Abandoned cars festoon the highways as, post-apocalyptically, they always do. (Just once, I would like a post-apocalyptic film to feature balloons.) Only a few flashbacks refer to a time before, when the world was in colour, the boy was a baby, and there was a mother on the scene, as played by a glowing, golden Charlize Theron, who at least had the sense to check out early.

The man and his son are seeking the sea, if only because it gives them some purpose. The father is scared of not being able to protect the boy.