Mortensen and McPhee look to one another for strength.

The monsters in our heads are often worse than the ones in our eyes, and the novelist enjoys that advantage over the filmmaker. Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, imagines a post-apocalyptic nightmare world in which an ailing father and his young son desperately trod dangerous miles over destroyed earth in the hope of finding some humanity–and of staying one step ahead of thieves, murderers and cannibals. And the reader’s imagination is just as paramount as the author’s. Although McCarthy provides descriptions in his mythopoetic prose, every sentence is aimed at awakening the darkest corners of the imagination, corridors several shades blacker than bleak. And without fleshed-out visuals to anchor us to one uniform vision, the story can keep us in thrall not only because of our universal fears but also because of personal ones.

The adaptation of The Road by director John Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall, while very loyal and sometimes moving, can’t match the deep chill of its source material. As in the book, dust covers the ruined earth and dirt covers the father and son as they seek some unknown refuge in a strange land they used to call their own. The casting is superb: Viggo Mortensen, as the determined, dying father whose sole mission is to prepare his child for life without him; Kodi Smit-McPhee as the frightened boy burdened by “carrying the fire” of humanity; Robert Duvall as the ancient wanderer almost magically clinging to life; and Guy Pearce as a scary stranger, who may provide a safe haven or may not. But unlike with the novel, the movie never makes you forget that you are watching their world from a safe distance.

What both book and film do very well is play upon the very real anxieties of parents for their children in our relatively saner, pre-apocalyptic world: that they not be harmed, that they know the difference between good and bad and that they carry within them “the fire,” an inextinguishable light, that we all need to sustain us across the many roads of life. (Available as a rental via Netflix and other outlets.)

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