The Road has John Hillcoat (The Proposition) in the director's chair, with Joe Penhall (Enduring Love) responsible for the screenplay. Adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel (No Country For Old Men), the film features Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee as a father and son attempting to live through a world after disaster has struck. It's difficult to know how you convince people to see something so dark, and I honestly don’t think I can myself, because of the unsettling feelings it brings up. It is certainly a depressing and desolate film; that much is obvious. Hillcoat isn’t trying to create an action-packed disaster movie. Remaining true to McCarthy's book, we find a world where plants and animals are nearly gone, where this part of America has no rules and is filled with people who eat others. People have disappeared from the scene entirely. How things got so bad isn’t explained – and that’s deliberate. We’re simply seeing what happens after some catastrophic event, experiencing it alongside a man and his son as they travel down the road. Hillcoat and cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe create a lifeless landscape to set the story against. Dry earth is all that remains for the few remaining trees, and the sky is marked by the ruins of what humans have built, with storms appearing almost to mock the characters. It’s an unbearable existence that makes you wonder why anyone would want to keep going. And then it struck me, five days after seeing the film – it's not just the bleakness of the apocalypse that gets to you; it's also a very well-done exploration of what it means to be a parent. Mortensen delivers an emotionally powerful performance, and Smit-McPhee shows incredible sensitivity, which makes the movie increasingly difficult to watch. This all leads up to the ending, where we’re given something captivating, insightful, and remarkably clever. It's demanding to sit through, but it holds your attention and makes you think from beginning to end. 8/10

Source on TMDB