The Road

In a post-apocalyptic world a father tries to protect and feed his son while travelling to the sea.

The apocalyptic event precipitating the film is only hinted at but it's effects are brilliantly realised on screen. No animals survived. All plant life has died and everywhere is ash. A lack of colour that isn't quite black and white gives the landscape a haunted, lifeless quality far beyond the hopeless feeling evoked in the not dissimilar Children of Men.

The key to this film though is the central pairing of Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit McPhee . If you didn't believe in or care about this father and son's struggle for survival this film would be an unbearable durge.

Mortensen as usual is outstanding as the gaunt man who knew the world before fighting to keep his own humanity for the sake of his son's. As with Christian Bale in the Machinist, he alsovappears to have shown a finger to food to attain just the right set of hollow eyes and protruding ribs. Surprisingly for a child though, Kodi matches him scene for scene as a child who only knows of a better life from the stories of his father but still has hope somewhere still holds better fir him.

This isn't a bright uplifting film but it is engrossing and a pervasive sense of danger lends the film a constant tension relieved only by the rolling of the credits. If you can bare the downbeat tone this is an outstanding film. An excellent start to 2010 moviegoing.