The 2009 film “The Road” tells the story of a man (Viggo Mortensen) and his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) struggling to survive in a barren hellscape of bare trees and gray skies after an unspecified catastrophe, perhaps a nuclear war or a supervolcano eruption, destroys civilization and the ecosystem.
The filmmakers adapted the late, great Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel of the same name and share McCarthy’s knack for visceral depictions of “man’s inhumanity to man.”
In one tense scene, the man and the boy flee from a feral gang of cannibals who capture and imprison people to kill and eat later. The pair are camping outside an abandoned highway tunnel when they are jolted awake by the noise of the pursuing…
