"The Road" — A vivid, heartbreaking journey through a desolate world

"She died somewhere in the dark. There is no other tale to tell."

These quiet words, from a gaunt, unnamed main character (Viggo Mortensen) form the heartbeat of "The Road." Based on Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic novel, John Hillcoat's film (adapted by Joe Penhall) follows a man haunted by the past as he faces a grim future, with his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) by his side.

Something unspecified, and terrible, has happened to the world: All is desolate and gray, and civilization seems to have disappeared — no electricity, no transportation, nowhere to buy food and almost no people. The man and his son, the skeleton of a family (the boy's mother, played by Charlize Theron, is dead, "somewhere in the dark"), walk slowly along muddy, deserted roads, making their way to the coast where they hope to find something, anything. Bandits, thieves and desperate souls waylay them as they cross an unrecognizably tattered yet blank landscape. "There aren't any crows, are there?" asks the boy. "Only in books," says his father.

In their travels, father and son sometimes find hints of a life now gone: a Coke can, a cushion's miraculously vivid print, a gracious house still standing. More often, what they encounter are signs of something quite different, such as pools of blood in the snow. At night, the man wrenchingly remembers the world as it used to be, with green grass, bright flowers and his wife smiling in a summer dress; it's the only lightness in the film.

Even with a tiny ray of hope at the end, "The Road" is unrelentingly bleak — just seeing Smit-McPhee's thin little face, as the pair gets weaker, is heartbreaking. But Hillcoat finds a chilly beauty in the ravaged landscapes (some of which were filmed in the Northwest, including Mount St. Helens and the Oregon coast), and Mortensen warms the film with his presence, creating a vivid portrait of a bereft man clinging to the one thing he has left. This fine actor is one of the few capable of investing a character with a full though unspoken past; you think you know, watching him, what kind of life this man had "before." He looks lovingly at his son and dreams of his wife, lost in the darkness, wondering if light will ever come.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com