My heart sank when I heard that John Hillcoat was to direct a film of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006), one of the more terminally grim performances in recent modern fiction. It is the story of a little boy who roams the post-nuclear devastated earth in the company of his father, while the world draws to an end amid murder, rape, cannibalism, and abysses of corruption – an inferno of a world, one of the war of all against all.

The Road is the kind of book parents might prefer not to read. It depicts the ultimate nightmare: a child – mother dead, father destined to follow her – approaching his doom in a universe where he can be torn apart, with nothing but a suicidal bullet to protect him against starvation or being devoured as some human marauder’s prey.