There's a terrible reality to "The Road" — a sickening, no-exit sensation of being in a waking nightmare. An old Woody Allen maxim has it that people don't want too much reality from the movies; "The Road" on the other hand, has no interest in what people want but what they can endure.
Gray and cold and gritty with dust, "The Road" has the look and texture of a chunk of fossilized catastrophe, or a fistful of dirt from the site of a nuclear power-plant disaster.
The film is based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Cormac McCarthy and it captures the utter, unspeakable bleakness of the story — set in the near future when the global climate is locked into a perpetual ice age, all vegetation is dead, food industries have collapsed and mankind is left to fend for itself . . . and fails miserably.