(2009) From the Appalachians to a post-apocalyptic landscape, following global devastation - a bright light followed by a series of low concussions - a father (Viggo Morgensen) and his preadolescent son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) cautiously make their way through the ashy-gray and sunless cold of a nuclear winter (though no mention is made of radioactive fallout) - no animals, birds, or crops remain, and the forests are dying - avoiding roving cannibalistic gangs "looking for food and fuel." Unlike the malevolent members of mankind, virtuous people apparently do not band together for comfort and protection.

In flashbacks of dreams and memories, the man (well-educated, perhaps as a physician) recalls the time before with his pregnant wife (Charlize Theron) and the decade together with their child before she gave up just trying to survive. Holding a revolver with two bullets to his mouth, the father - "Can you do it when the time comes?" - rehearses the way to commit suicide with the boy. He assures his son ("the child is my warrant"): "I'll kill anyone who touches you because that's my job."

In this bleak presentiment, directed by John Hillcoat from screenwriter Joe Penhall's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel, the father instructs his son - "I'm trying to prepare him for the day when I'm gone" - that he must be willing to cast aside everything except for "carrying the fire within," in order to persevere - including stop thinking about his mother. "How do we do that?" the boy asks.

As in all end-of-the-world stories, here as well there are "not many good guys left." When the boy asks, "Are we still the good guys?," the father reassures: "Always will be." Yet the father will disappoint the child, who retains his angelic innocence.

Headed for the coast and then southward, they enter a house where they find starving people kept locked inside a cellar for the smokehouse, visit the father's former childhood home (where the boy thinks he sees another boy), discover an underground temporary safe haven before coming upon an old man (Robert Duvall), who calls himself Ely (the only name given to a character). "I knew this was coming," says the wizened prophet: "And whoever made humanity will find no humanity here. So beware. Beware."

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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