Deborah Ross

Going nowhere

The Road<br /> 15, nationwide

issue 09 January 2010

The Road
15, nationwide

The Road is based on Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel and, as far as roads go, this one is long, hard, brutal, pitiless and profoundly horrible, plus there doesn’t seem to be much reward for sticking with it. It is very much like the North Circular in all these respects, unless you count finally getting to Ikea as a reward, which no one in their right mind would. ‘The horror, the horror,’ as Joseph Conrad would surely have said, if he’d found himself in Ikea on a Saturday afternoon. He might also have added: ‘And the meatballs are rubbish,’ but we’ll just never really know.

But here? With this road? OK, here we have a father (Viggo Mortensen) and his 8-year-old son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) who appear to be among the last survivors of some unspecified cataclysm.

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