The Road: A devastating vision, brought beautifully to screen

TikTok got me thinking about great book-to-screen adaptations. There are plenty of good and bad out there. For me, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is one of my all-time favourite book-to-screen adaptations. Not because it’s flashy or overly faithful in a scene-by-scene sense, but because it captures the soul of the novel with eerie precision. Both book and film are bleak, yes. But they’re also deeply human, tender even, and ultimately unforgettable.

The film, directed by John Hillcoat and released in 2009, stars Viggo Mortensen as “the man” and Kodi Smit-McPhee as “the boy.” Their performances are quiet, raw, and wholly immersed in McCarthy’s apocalyptic vision. Charlize Theron appears in flashbacks as the boy’s mother, a role that is expanded in the film to bring added emotional weight.

What’s extraordinary is how well the movie honours McCarthy’s prose. His writing is famously spare, stripped of quotation marks and excess, yet rich in rhythm and meaning. He doesn’t waste a single word. Each sentence feels earned, pared back to its emotional and existential core.

Take this passage, for example, which comes late in the novel, and it says so much in so little:

“He walked out in the grey light and stood, and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere, two hunted animals were trembling like groundhogs in their den. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”

It’s staggering. McCarthy’s genius is that he can take the simplest vocabulary —grey light, cold, darkness, borrowed time —and use it to evoke an entire cosmology of despair and tenderness. This isn’t just a post-apocalyptic survival story. It’s a meditation on what it means to care for someone in a world that offers no guarantees, not even survival.

What the film gets so right is the stillness. The silence between scenes. The burnt, ashen landscapes filmed in Pennsylvania and Louisiana. The cinematography mirrors McCarthy’s minimalism, allowing viewers to sit with the emotional weight of the story rather than rushing through it.

And, of course, there’s the ending. Oh my god, that ending. I read this book in one sitting. That has not happened often, and the book had a big emotional impact on me. So if, like me, you had read the book, you know it: devastating and redemptive at once. The film preserves that balance, the thin thread of hope that somehow endures in a world where everything else has been stripped away.