The Road, adapted from Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is a harrowing tale of a man and his son trudging through a ravaged, post-apocalyptic landscape and of humanity collapsing back into Hobbesian self-preservation – even cannibalism – under stress. This testing of the breaking point of our moral system is played out in the dialogue between the man and the boy: are the “good guys” really out there, or just a fairy tale for children? Or are the bad guys, in fact, inside everyone who gets hungry enough?

Hillcoat’s film is an effective visualisation of the novel, bringing to the screen a burnt, grey, indust­rial wasteland as stark as McCormack’s prose, with landscapes that dwarf the lonely survivors only now aware of the awful might of their environment. A hint of sentimentality has crept into the relationship between father and son, edging out the more interesting question of the man’s use of the boy as justification for his own continued existence, but essent­ially this is an incredibly faithful adaptation – faithful to a fault. The novel’s flat structure powerfully mimics for the reader that mono­tonous road that is a backdrop to the protagonist’s thoughts; translated into a medium which foregrounds action, it just seems shapeless and without tension. Hillcoat again fails to compensate for this loss of the internal monologue in his characterisation – we care about the man in the book because we ride inside his head, and we imagine our responses to his ruined world would be similar to his. But while a book can work as myth, can cast Everyman as its lead, that lack of individualisation is harder to carry off in film. We don’t care about Hillcoat’s empty, unremarkable leads, and so his film drops from us as we leave the cinema, rather than lodging inside us. It is a disturbing vision of what our post-cataclysm world will be like, but not of what it will be like to live in it.