Anytime the man turns his back on the boy or separates from him, it feels - in a way that scary, apocalyptic movies often do - as if everything will end. When the father grips the boy's mouth to quiet him, it is too rough. When they run from danger, they clank and rustle and seem wetly destined to never get away. When they do move, the father and the son progress through a quietly seething dream, a world at its end. Sounds awful, because it goddamned well is. Ruined, wrecked, used up - it is our world, consumed at its edges by fire, at its center by rot. There is no color left in anything - not the people, not the plants, not the faces of mountains. People-zombies, some of them hungry for human flesh, stare out from abandoned office buildings and sometimes hunt other people. This is what happens: A father and a son walk from point A to point B through a desolate landscape. And yet now they stand there watching the fire, dazed, like two drunks gazing out the window of a Laundromat at a mushroom cloud.Įverything about the film seems disconnected in this way - shocky and post-traumatic. From the get-go, the father and son have moved. It feels like the two of them should get out of there. Dense and hot, certainly loud, it's the sort of fire from which there is no safe distance. The fire leers profanely from one edge of the screen to the other. Originally published in the June 2009 issueĪt one point in The Road, a moment that is never otherwise explained or referenced, the father and the son stare at a dead forest as it burns.
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