Concrete Playground

Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novella is a personal, epic poem about a father and son clinging to their humanity in a post-apocalyptic world. Suitably, a lyrical director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) has brought the story to the screen, capturing the stultifying bleakness and depravity in which the last tendrils of hope still remain. Reuniting with The Proposition scribe Nick Cave, and star Guy Pearce, Hillcoat brings his own, confident eye to the tale; casting Australian newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee (Romulus, My Father) alongside Viggo Mortensen (Lord of the Rings) as the leads Man and Boy.

This is a sparse, disturbing and evocatively precise film. Screenwriter Joe Penhall, cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe and production designer Chris Kennedy have done a remarkable job recreating McCarthy’s harrowing dystopia (just what caused the world’s demise is provocatively left untold), while Mortensen and Smit-McPhee generate beautiful chemistry in what is a captivating love story between father and son as well as a brutal right of passage.

The overuse of Cave’s muscular music sullies the experience somewhat, however Hillcoat succeeds in creating his unflinching apocalypse, while quietly shepherding his film towards a faint, fading mirage of hope.

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By Alice Tynan