An unnamed father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) journey together toward the sea across a blitzed post-apocalyptic landscape. Some years have passed since an unexplained cataclysm has killed most life on earth. The air is choked with ash and the small family unit may not survive the winter. The pair hope to encounter other ‘good people’ but most of the human survivors they meet have been reduced to cannibalism, senseless violence and scarcely imaginable horrors.
Director John Hillcoat’s brave and fiercely honest adaptation seldom strays from Cormac McCarthy’s coruscating source novel. Despite the bleak, unforgiving landscape and the devolved human specimens we encounter, this is a poem to familial bonds and loss. The director clings to the notion as much tenacity as his hero and finds a strange loveliness in the desolation. Grey has seldom seemed so multifaceted.
Brilliantly performed and starkly realised, we know what picture we’ll be rooting for when awards season rolls around.