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This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

Breathtaking in the totality of its harrowing vision, The Road is an unflinching contemplation on the astonishing duality of the human animal. It imagines a future of ash where the best and worst of humanity meet in a Darwinian arena to discover, once and for all, which is the fittest and worthy of survival. It is a film of singular, all-pervasive sweep, a piece of art so implausibly agile, both the optimist and the pessimist can walk away having seen themselves reflected there.

There is an evocative sentence in Comac McCarthy’s novel that perfectly captures the pervasive bleakness of both the author’s vision and director John Hillcoat’s (The Proposition) faithful adaptation. It describes a blighted landscape “held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell.” Across this post-apocalyptic America struggle two isolated figures, a man (Viggo Mortensen) and a boy (the galvanizing Kodi Smit-McPhee).

We are not told what brought about the apocalypse. Was it man-made, the product of human warfare or some sort of global natural disaster? That information is lost to us. It is also irrelevant. As spasmodic earthquakes rend the crust of the planet, the skies take on the color of cold steel and shower the surface of the earth with an unceasing and putrefying rain. All fauna has vanished; the flora is not far behind. “It is cold,” the man tells us, “and getting colder as the world slowly dies.”

This is the only world the boy has ever known. He was born the same time the world died. He and his father crawl through the ruins searching for food and shelter on a journey toward the sea. The boy discovers an arrowhead, a cipher of a civilization long dead; the world is an arrowhead. They have only a pistol with two bullets, the wasted clothes on their backs, a shopping cart of foraged food and each other. They are not living with hope for a better world; they are only existing, biding their time till the predetermined, grisly end. Survival, we come to discover, is not a team sport; the man crushes any sign of compassion his son displays. He must. It is a weakness neither of them can afford. They do their best to avoid any contact with the species formally known as human — now roving, murderous, starving doppelgangers of the worst angels of our natures, scavengers who frequent human slaughterhouses to pick at the carcasses of the fallen.

There are moments — not flashbacks so much as snatches of dreams — in which we see the world that was before — idyllic, sun-drenched and lovely — imagery all the more haunting when the dreamer awakes to scorched landscapes and blasted cities lined with the withering steel skeletons. The decaying corpse is comforting and familiar; the dreams are alien and terrifying. That one scene during which these dreams manifest themselves occurs in the shattered husk of a long-dead church seems to be all the metaphor we need.

You may not recognize hope when it appears, so misshapen and filthy has it become. And when it flits into view, it is usually swallowed hole by agony a moment later. This is a world in which the most sage advise a father can offer is how best to kill oneself, in which anguish is always affixed to the heels of hope, and where God gives comfort only to snatch it right back. “Whoever made humanity will find no humanity here,” we are told. In this world, death is the only true luxury.

The last time someone adapted a piece by Comac McCarthy, it won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture (No Country for Old Men). His films are no more horror films than The Road is a science fiction film, yet they indisputably borrow the language of both. But McCarthy’s worldview, seemingly bleached of hope, is far nimbler than one might think.

Sometimes one is convinced that his nihilism is total, while elsewhere he seems to tease at a God who waits benevolently in the wings. The Road is such a film. The narrative seems to suggest that the smartest person is the boy’s mother, who one day abandoned her loved ones to intentionally perish alone in the freezing woods. She simply accepted the inevitable earlier than the rest. For McCarthy, it is the only rational thing to do. And yet we cannot overlook the interplay between the man and the boy. Indeed, their bond is at the heart of the film, the core that drives them and the film. The man, who has sworn to protect the boy to the end, tells us, “If he is not the word of God, then God never spoke.” When the boy asks, “Are we still the good guys?” you can sense the brittle and impossibly frail future of the human species in the man’s reciprocal question, “Are you still carrying the fire?”

Whether you see the end of The Road as hopeful is, I suppose, entirely up to you. It is an entirely plausible conclusion, a vibrant and piercing flash of light in an otherwise black expanse. Or, hope is little more than snake oil and nothing has fundamentally changed; we are still in step on our prolonged march to the inevitable. Either interpretation is correct.

Fittingly, I walked home from my screening of The Road alone and in the rain. I could not shake the film, nor, in truth, did I want to. It was something that coated me from head to foot. I was embalmed in it. A few minutes later I sat down to my lunch, which I ate in isolation and silence. I have never had a meal that tasted so good.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.