This film was released 8th January 2010, and is no longer screening.

The sun has gone, the trees are dead, the few survivors wander a landscape of ashes and foreboding as novelist Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic vision is rendered terrifyingly believable in John (The Proposition) Hillcoat’s imposing screen adaptation. We follow a man and his son (Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee) as they venture across the remnants of an America devastated by some unexplained cataclysm. Almost anything that can be used or eaten has already been looted: hunger has virtually expunged the last glimmerings of morality as the remaining scavengers feed on one another. What does it mean to be human, to try to raise a son in the midst of such horrors?

Essentially faithful to its Pulitzer-winning source, the film brings probing compassion and a chilling eye for detail which somehow makes the questions all the more urgent. Stately and haunting, it’s a warning you won’t forget, and certainly one to be taken far more seriously than Hollywood’s usual popcorn brand of disaster spectacle. Notes by Trevor Johnston