The Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men certainly set the bar high in terms of book-to-screen adaptations of Cormac McCarthy’s work. Many readers felt that Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road was probably McCarthy’s most unfilmable novel. But when it was announced that John Hillcoat (The Proposition) would be at the helm, everything seemed possible.

Working from a script by playwright Joe Penhall, The Road follows the journey of a father and son who have become wandering scavengers after an undefined cataclysmic event has destroyed the world as we know it. A perfectly cast Viggo Mortensen is the once-civilised man shepherding his 11-year-old boy (newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee) through an unrecognisable American landscape. What we see of the remains of humanity is mostly horrific. The few who are still living have completely lost their moral compass. The father, fearing for his health and sanity, is sustained only by his love for his son, and his need to protect him. Encounters on the road with a thief and an old man (an unrecognisable but superb Robert Duvall) rouse his suspicion. But the boy, born just after the apocalypse, desperately seeks human companionship. All we know of the pair’s history is told in flashbacks, and Hillcoat’s one addition to the original text includes Charlize Theron as the absent wife and mother.

Despite the harrowing subject matter, and an equally austere score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, Hillcoat, through the superb performances by Mortensen and Smit-McPhee, manages to capture not only the cautionary nature of McCarthy’s tale, but its ultimate sense of hope as well.