In the year I was born, 1965, a film was released that painted a grim picture of life after a nuclear confrontation. Called The War Game, it probably still gets wheeled out to shock people to this day. Later, a tv film called Threads presented a harrowing vision of Sheffield after the bomb the year I went there as a student. But in truth, I’m fairly typical of my generation in being more taken with the post-apocalypse future as presented in the Mad Max trilogy, and the journey that Judge Dredd took through the Cursed Earth in the pages of 2000AD.

I’ve experienced my fair share of grim future scenarios in which rugged loners battle mutants and savage tribes coutoured by whoever styled Village People, and more or less enjoyed a range of films in that milieu from well known ones like Planet of the Apes to obscurities such as Salute of the Jugger. And then Cormac McCarthy comes along, and takes all the fun out of Earth’s death knell with a book called The Road.

Not that I’ve read the book yet, you understand. But I have just seen the film it inspired, and I think it’s fair to say my desire to see Tina Turner commanding legions of men with spiked leather body armour has dissipated. Writer Joe Penhall and director John Hillcoat present a scenario that comes across with frightening credibility, as a father and son travel across an America with sulphurous skies, derelict cities and burning forests, hoping that in reaching the coast they’ll find something like salvation.

The son’s repeated refrain is ‘Are we still the good guys?’, and it’s ever tougher to answer that question with the positivity the father would wish for as they encounter other people on their travels. Food is scarce, and the easiest source of protein walks on two legs. Cannibalism is the line that sets father and son apart from many of those they encounter, and it leads to some grim scenarios. Sometimes they’re potential victims, but there’s also an occasion when they come across a cellar that’s been converted into a larder and leave the human livestock to their fates while fleeing themselves. In the circumstances there’s little else they could do, and the story is about exactly such circumstances.

In stripping away the fantastic elements that most post-apocalypse films relish, what’s left is a truly epic story of survival. The father starts the film with a pistol holding two bullets, one for each of them in case they run afoul of cannibals. More than that, he even shows his son what angle to hold the gun in his mouth to ensure he’s killed clean and quick. It’s that starkness which gives The Road its power, and other choices are similarly loaded. Is it wise or stupid to share food with a stranger when you’ve only got what you can carry in a cart? Breaking bread together is the basis of civilisation, and in its absence what’s left?

There are no answers presented, just a clear depiction of the realities of life minus the social cushioning we’re used to. No wonder that the father is troubled by dreams of the past with his wife, and is so affected when he comes across a piano. There might be no place for music in the world of the story, but the soundtrack by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis forms an important part of the texture of the film, providing subtle colour that’s variously ominous, bleak, and nostalgic.

Beautifully filmed, and with note-perfect performances from Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee as the father and son, The Road is as powerful and unpreachy a message about the future of the world as you’re likely to come across. This is cinema of rare quality, perhaps even importance, though I’m aware as I say so that one day it’ll become just another DVD found in a landfill site a century from now. Let’s hope Tina Turner’s not the queen of that or any other wasteland by the time that future comes about.