The movie that haunted me the most this past year was The Road, the adaption of the Cormac McCarthy novel — though it’s definitely not for everyone. Two friends I went with left the theater saying that it was the worst movie they’d ever seen.

One of the things that I love about this movie is the desaturated, bleak landscape that it’s set in — I believe filmed along an abandoned or rundown freeway somewhere in Pennsylvania. Though I haven’t read the book, others have said that the internal monologue and despair that it communicates is lost, but I thought the movie made up in landscape what it may have lacked in inner monologue.

It raises questions about the environment and human violence subtly and effectively, starting with an unspecified disaster in the beginning of the movie that seems to be either nuclear war or some kind of extreme climate change event. It takes a completely different approach to stripping humans to the basics — their interactions with nature and their moral code — than other movies, like Avatar, which in very different ways addresses similar themes.