The Road movie is a bleak, post-apocalyptic drama with an ending that packs quite the gut punch — here’s the end of The Road movie explained. Director John Hillcoat made Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road into a movie in 2009, and it’s a largely faithful page-to-screen adaptation. Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee star as a father and son (credited only as “Man” and “Boy") trying to survive after an unspecified extinction event has wiped out most of the population. Action movie star Charlize Theron appears in a series of flashbacks as the man’s wife, who chose suicide over living in the savage new world they inhabit, while Robert Duvall and Michael Kenneth Williams have small roles as fellow survivors. The Road follows the man and the boy as they head southwards through the barren wasteland in search of the coast and warmer climes, scavenging what little food they can find and having terrifying encounters with marauders and cannibals along the way.
The man tries to protect his son as best he can but realizes how desperate their situation is and so keeps a gun loaded with their last bullet and ensures the boy knows how to take his own life, since death isn't the worst fate for the boy in the post-apocalyptic 2019 shown in The Road. This is as difficult to watch as it sounds, and there’s no let-up during The Road’s ending either. At the climax of The Road movie, the pair finally arrive at the coast only to find it just as barren as the mainland. As they make their way through a derelict coastal town, the man is shot in the leg with an arrow by a paranoid fellow survivor. In The Road, the man kills his assailant with a flare gun he’s scavenged but slowly succumbs to his wound and a worrying cough he’s been plagued with throughout the movie as his son watches him die. That's not all that happens though, so here's the full ending of The Road explained.
The Road Has A Deliberately Bitter-Sweet Ending
The final scenes of The Road’s ending offer a glimmer of hope — at least according to some. A couple of days after the boy’s father dies he’s approached by a man (played by Prometheus' Guy Pearce and credited as “Veteran”) who is travelling with what appears to be his wife (Molly Parker), their two young kids, and their pet dog. They tell the boy they’ve been following him and his father for some time and ask if he’d like to accompany them, offering a light at the end of the grim tunnel that is the experience of The Road.
However, some have a much darker interpretation of this potentially hopeful ending for The Road movie. It’s posited that Guy Pearce’s character and his companions are actually cannibals rather than the saviors they seem to be and have been following the boy until his father died in hopes of securing their next meal. That said, The Road’s ending is fairly ambiguous so whether its younger protagonist meets a bleak end or goes on to survive another day of the Mad Max-type apocalypse in the care of a new family is up to the viewer to decide.
The Road Movie Is Bleak But Has Nothing On The Book
While The Road movie adaptation is certainly bleak, the book is actually much worse. For example, there's a passage in which the two main characters pass a group of cannibals who are roasting a human baby on a spit. It's necessary for studios to make plenty of changes when it comes to book-to-movie adaptations, and The Road wasn't exempt. That being said, The Road is considered a somewhat faithful adaptation. Most changes weren't made to change the plot, but in order to make the ending of the movie more palpable for audiences. A notable example of this elsewhere is the infamous sewer orgy from Stephen King's IT novel being cut from every on-screen adaptation. An example from The Road includes the death of the Father. This moment was borderline unwatchable in the movie, but it's even sadder in the book's ending. While both the movie and the book see the Boy staying with the Father three days after his death, in the book the Father actually dies in the woods after attempting to set up a campsite, never getting to see the coast. The horrors of the Marauders are also downplayed in the movie. For example, in the books, some had catamites (sexual slaves of a pubescent age used for degradation and harassment). All in all, these changes were necessary, as some elements of The Road as a book were just too unappetizing to appear on the big screen.