Survival of the fittest: Kodi Smit- McPhee and Viggo Mortensen in The Road

THE ROAD ****

Directed by John Hillcoat. Starring Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce 16 cert, gen release, 111 min

The Roadis a powerful drama about daring to hope in a hopeless world, writes Donald Clarke

GREY CLOUDS of suffocating dust cover the sun and cause healthy people to wheeze after just a few minutes walking. Cities have crumbled into rocky stubble. Gangs of cannibalistic rapists prowl the wasteland. Civilisation is dead.

Oh, and a happy new year to you too.

Fears that the movie version of Cormac McCarthy's hugely admired post-apocalyptic novel would tidy up the book's darker images prove to be unfounded. Mind you, any viewer who has sat through John Hillcoat's brilliant The Proposition– an Australian western of Old Testament grimness – would know not to expect Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Hillcoat alters little in McCarthy’s neat Beckettian scenario. Following an unspecified catastrophe, an unnamed man and his young son travel through choking gloom towards the coast where, for no good reason, they hope to find a degree of relief. Along the way, they meet with certain practical and ethical dilemmas. The Man has a gun but only two bullets, most likely intended for himself and his child.

This is a strange, unclassifiable beast. A few odd highbrow efforts such as Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrificenoted, the post-apocalyptic movie has usually been the preserve of genre specialists such as George Romero and George Miller. It's all very well to make satirical comments in Night of the Living Deador Mad Max, but "serious" film-makers have tended to steer clear of vulgar apocalypses.

As it happens, Hillcoat straddles the divide between the pulpy and the profound very effectively. The relationship between Viggo Mortensen’s near-despairing dad and his permanently uneasy son – too young to properly remember an ordered world – is teased out slowly, to impressively moving effect.

Some of the encounters are a little too starkly allegorical, and the ending is (for me at least) highly problematic, but those aspects are adapted faithfully from the book and Joe Penhall, the talented playwright behind the stark, disciplined script, would have been brave to tamper radically with such a beloved text.

For the most part, the picture does a very good job of exploring McCarthy’s central quandary: why should a man remain good in a chaotic universe? Elsewhere, Hillcoat allows elements of old-school horror melodrama to creep in. An adventure in a house inhabited by cannibals is more chilling than anything Wes Craven has accomplished in the past 20 years.

After such sequences, the occasional flashbacks to The Man's life with his wife (Charlize Theron) – already tainted by grim omens, but still at home to faint splashes of colour – come as an enormous relief. Some may find those scenes unnecessary, but, without them, the film might have been oppressive to the point of unwatchability. The Roadis, after all, one of the few post-apocalyptic pictures that never pretends such a disaster could offer opportunities for uninhibited fun.

As the heroes wander through another blasted wasteland (much of the film was shot in unrepaired sections of New Orleans), one is bound to reflect that, for all the deficiencies of modern civilisation, it remains preferable to the anarchic alternative. In The Road, nobody gets to hunt zombies for sport. Nobody gets to try on posh clothes in an abandoned shopping mall. Hillcoat dares to offer us a world that is drab, soulless and deeply boring.

It is a measure of the director’s achievement that his film is none of those things.