ESSENTIALLY MAD MAX WITH A BOOKISH PEDIGREE, The Road offers the drained colors, devastated landscapes, and despairing mood that denote "realism" in contemporary American cinema. But the film, adapted by director John Hillcoat and scripter Joe Penhall from Cormac McCarthy's novel, is actually an odd species of macho wish-fulfillment fantasy: Imagine if the U.S.A. were to become Bosnia, circa 1992 — but with cannibals. Wouldn't that be cool!

Of course, The Road can't admit that it thinks the end of civilization is kind of neat. Shot on location in unpretty locations in Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and Oregon, the film maintains a detached air, even during scenes that are pure monster-movie-matinee. Hillcoat may have made The Proposition, an Aussie Western that was laughably lurid. But he's not Joel and Ethan Coen, who turned McCarthy's No Country for Old Men into a deadpan existential farce. The director keeps things dry, even when the folksy-orchestral score — by Warren Ellis and goth-rocker, putative novelist, and Proposition scripter Nick Cave — turns dangerously moist.

Ideal for low-budget sweep, the story focuses on only two characters. A man (Viggo Mortensen) and his preteen son (Kodi Smit-McPhee), both unnamed, trudge through gray, wintry vistas. Occasionally, they meet desperate fellow survivors of some mysterious calamity. (Anyone who's seen Peter Greenaway's The Falls will recognize the disaster as that structuralist comedy's VUE — the violent unexplained event.) In over-abundant flashbacks, we meet the man's wife and the boy's mother (Charlize Theron), also nameless. She couldn't abide the VUE's aftermath anymore, so she vanished. "Go south," she says before evaporating into the netherworld that McCarthy's fables reserve for women.

So the duo heads toward water — perhaps the Gulf of Mexico — dodging butchers as they tramp the now-obsolete interstates. "South" means warmth, apparently, but not much else. No edible plants or fruits grow there, since all food sources vanished in the VUE. There aren't even supposed to be any animals, which is why cannibalism is rampant. Occasionally, father and son happen upon some packaged grub; once, they feast on a bomb shelter's stash of Cheetohs and canned soup. But they will not eat human flesh, because they are — dad repeatedly reassures — "the good guys."

Just as in the Mad Max trilogy, the emphasis is on preserving the totems of manly rural culture: cars and guns. The electricity is permanently out, but such mechanical devices still work, if gasoline and bullets can be found to give them purpose. In the first of the father and son's two closest calls, they barely escape a gang whose grizzled members have managed to acquire a truck, some gas, and a few rifles. The thugs are on a diabolical joy ride, scouting for people to eat. Luckily, dad needs use only one of his two bullets to win the skirmish.

Eventually, a stray mutt appears, which completes the story's virile love triangle. If the only righteous man left on earth has his gun, his boy, and his dog, then everything's right with the world. Although some more Cheetohs sure would be nice.

Inevitably, The Road is episodic. It's just a bunch of things that happen to two people as they struggle from point A (for appalling) to point B (for bleak). The circumstances that the filmmakers (and the novelist) have imagined present so few possibilities that the journey becomes notable more for monotony than horror. The hasty encounters with survivors played by Robert Duvall, Michael K. Williams, and Guy Pearce play like acting cameos rather than expansions of the movie's vision. These minor characters live in the same one-note universe as the father and son, so they can't open up the saga.

Hillcoat never loses control, and Mortensen doesn't waver. (Smit-McPhee is a little too whipped to be interesting.) Yet director and star's commitment to the material isn't enough to render The Road convincing. I checked out early, when I noticed something absent from those near-empty highways: bicycles. The pre-apocalypse U.S.A. is hooked on gasoline and electricity, but it's not without devices that run on human, wind, or water power. After the VUE, you'd have to be pretty committed to aimless quests to hit the road, rather than staying home to get the grist mill working, or hook up a windmill to the closest small generator.

After noticing the fundamental illogic of walking rather than peddling to the coast, you might wonder about the film's agenda. Who would imagine a disaster that destroys soybeans and apples, chickens and trout, leaving humans alive without any snacks save each other? Only somebody with an unhealthy interest — conceptual, if not culinary — in cannibalism. It's the end of the world, and you taste fine.

"The child is my warrant," declares dad in an early voiceover, and a father's duty to his son is the universal theme that seeks to justify the film's ludicrous desolation. But a lone boy isn't much of a future for the human race. That makes the pair's slog to the sea a passage without a dramatic goal. If the duo's purpose is merely to stay alive a little longer, then The Road is nothing more than a slasher movie.

Actually, the film has a more reactionary subtext. It envisions a country where there are but three classes of people: ragtag militias, nuclear families, and about-to-be-eaten victims. The gummint is gone, and nobody's interested in reconstituting it. Every-man-for-himself-ism is demanding but liberating — as long as there's still a bullet left in the chamber.

The Road clearly means to be sober and high-toned. After all, it's based on a literary novel. But a vision of the future that relishes catastrophe, cannibalism, and solipsism ain't literature. It's survivalist porn.

THE ROAD — 2009, 110 min; at Regal Gallery Place, Landmark Bethesda Row, and suburban multiplexes.