Directed by John Hillcoat

Cormac McCarthy's desolate tale of post-apocalyptic survival could have found no better director to convert it to the screen than John Hillcoat, whose 2005 film The Proposition showed what a master he is at portraying brutality and utter hopelessness. It's a pretty faithful adaptation of the novel, and though sparing us some of the worst of the physical horrors in there it's a hard, shocking and depressing view of what the urge for survival might drive humanity to.

The earth has suffered some unspecified catastrophe which has blotted out the sun, killed most of the natural world, and forced man to the worst kinds of savagery to survive. This we witness through the eyes of a man (Viggo Mortensen) and his 10-year-old son (Kodi Smit-McPhee )as they walk the road, their few wordly goods in a rusting supermarket trolley, scavenging what food they can from crumbling supermarkets and abandoned houses, hoping to find some kind of salvation that we and they know is almost certainly not there to be found. Through flashback we see the onset of the cataclysm, at around the time of the child's birth, and have idealised glimpses of the ordinary life the man once knew - a lost Eden reminiscent of the doomed domestic bliss of The Proposition's Captain Stanley. This is practically the only time we see colour. The disaster, blanketing the earth with grey cloud, has forced colour out ; nature, the sea, and flesh are a uniform grey, the only other shades in this new world being the red of blood and the bluish pink horror of entrails. And the grimmest thing is man. That all decency and so called civilisation are only skin deep is the real shocking heart of the film, as of the book. The last hope the Man holds onto is his fierce love for his son, and belief that the two of them are ‘the good guys', and will never take into themselves the brutality that is all around them.

But signs begin to grow that for survival, at least that of his son, he is capable of inhuman acts, and the moral centre swings from him to the boy. It's a great performance by the young actor, an almost constant presence, and shameful that his name is not headlined on the film's poster. Viggo Mortensen, who looks more gaunt and intense with every film he makes, grinds his suffering into our hearts and heads with his portrait of a driven man trying to hang onto what scraps of decency he can.

As in No Country for Old Men, McCarthy's previous film incarnation, there's very little hope for society as a moral structure, all the big ideas of community, sympathy, altruism seemingly gone. But surprisingly while that scintillates with a perverse and amoral joie de vivre, it's this film which offers an incongruous, unexpected hope.

Seen at Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle, January 2010