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John Hillcoat’s "The Road” delivers the gray, rundown world Cormac McCarthy envisioned in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, a place blighted by pestilence and calamity where "the good guys,” a phrase that frequently comes with question marks and doubt, will only survive if they stay together and "carry the fire.”

How the world ended does not matter, but in flashbacks the Man and the Woman (Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron) are awakened by wildfires in the distance. The man fills the bathtub with water — a standard survival tactic for people living in earthquake-prone areas — but no bathtub is big enough for what follows. The bulk of "The Road” takes place nearly a decade later, when the Man and the Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) only have each other and are traveling south, hoping to find warmer weather in a bitterly cold, devastated world.

Everything about their environment is unforgiving. Plants are dead, water must be filtered through wads of clothing, and the only remaining traditional food consists of carefully hoarded canned goods. As such, the greatest threat to the Man and the Boy are the people who have turned to nontraditional food, as bands of cannibals now stalk the forests.

"The Road” is a pilgrimage to nowhere, a terrifying stalk through places that never look obviously like the ruins of any particular place or town. Viewers will not see the Washington Monument at an angle or a submerged Manhattan. Instead, Hillcoat purposely found areas that had been blighted by either natural or economic disasters, places where the apocalypse has essentially already happened. Deserted highways and industrial ghost towns in Pennsylvania, along with suburban tracts devastated by Hurricane Katrina, provide evocative stand-ins for what appears to be global endgame.