Film on the Square Gala
The Road

Friday 16th October Vue 5 and 7
Saturday 17th October Vue 6
Monday 19th October Vue 6

Nationwide UK release: 8th January*
Nationwide US release: 25th November*

Upended and uprooted trees, vandalized shops, torched depleted fields and the barren wasteland. Something has happened to the world, what it is we are never told, neither do the unnamed man or boy talk about it. The once-familiar landscape is stripped of life, strangely sublime and vacant. The world is devoid of colour, all is gray, ashen and dusty; the world has crumbled and shut down on itself, and this is all that’s left, and this is all the boy knows.

The Road is the sort of film that reduces grown men to tears, which it did to the two men who sat beside me in the cinema. From the beginning the bleak atmosphere plunges you into its stark world in which humans are reduced to feral, starving and homeless beings; a world where humanity ceases to exist, except with the boy. Born after the cataclysm, there is an innate goodness and a resilient fire installed in the boy. Twelve-year-old Kodi Smit-McPhee is staggering in his understated force, especially when considering the role’s intense demand, while, dirty and bedraggle, Viggo Mortensen is perfectly cast as the man, bringing a quiet dignity to a man fraught with visceral panic.

In the man’s shrunken eyes make we feel his despair and undying parental love for the boy, but also his anger; anger against the situation and time. As coughs up blood, he knows this is his last chance; his last chance to prepare the boy; his last chance to be a father. There isn’t an understanding world left, this is survival, but for the man, the boy is all that matters and because of this, it hurts more than ever to care, and these scenes are the most heartbreaking.

The Road is an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, but having never read it, I can only comment John Hillcoat’s cinematic adaptation in itself, and what Hillcoat creates from McCarthy’s novel is a relentlessly depressing reality, yet from this darkness emerges an unlikely pensive and profound sanguinity. Charlize Theron also star as the woman who is pregnant when the catastrophe happens, appears in the devastating yet affectionate memories of the man. Aside from the affecting performances by both Smit-McPhee and Mortensen, the film’s cinematography is as stark and moving as Guernica. The Road is emotionally demanding and draining, however, it is worth enduring for that miniscule beating hearty fire and affirmation of hope.