In reading Cormac McCarthy`s award-winning novel The Road, you can’t help but get enraptured by the imagery and the emotion of a father trying desperately to keep his son alive on the fringes of decaying society in post-apocalyptic America. It’s not an easy novel by any stretch, but finishing it is incredibly satisfying; there is no end just the promise that maybe this isn’t the end. That promise is kept in John Hillcoat’s adaptation of The Road, which premiered this past weekend at the Toronto International Film Festival. At the same time though, the bleakness, the isolation and the near suicidal despair still work better on the written page, where the thoughts of the title character, known simply as “The Man,” are spilled out uncensored and unrestrained.

Viggo Mortensen plays The Man and Kodi Smit-McPhee plays his son. They travel “The Road,” the deserted remains of America’s once mighty highway system, travelling in one direction hoping for the coast, and hoping to avoid any cannibals and scavengers they might encounter along the way. A number of top actors put in what are basically cameo performances as people The Man and his son encounter during their travels, as Charlize Theron plays The Man’s wife in flashbacks. The thing of it is that all these little roles add to a kind of irksome factor in that the desolate world of McCarthy’s novel suddenly seems so very crowded.

You can’t fault the script because it was picking up on all the things from the novel. Obviously all the scenes with other people are heavy on typical movie things like action and dialogue, but what made the novel work for me was the isolation. Those long stretches where The Man and boy encounter no one, frightened for what’s around the next bend, forging for spare nuts and half rotten apples. There’s an entire section in the novel where the two go hungry for days on end before their saved by the bomb shelter store house, and for a brief minute they find salvation. In the film, that brief moment seems even briefer. That part was actually good, but half of what worked in the book was imagining what horrors await in the dark.

But in these situations I always try and measure on a movie on its own without the baggage of its original work. Director Hillcoat miraculously seems to have found the dead Earth described by McCarthy, so much so that the decimated wilderness is almost the third character accompanying father and son on the journey. Young Smit-McPhee is a revelation finding both the maturity and childishness that are equal in the boy. Mortensen as the father wears so much of his emotion on his scruffy face; the rare happiness he feels seems even happier and his longing and sadness wear like a weathered old jacket. The exchanges between Mortensen and Smit-McPhee almost perfectly echo the way that father and son interact in the book, but I’m trying to get away from those comparisons, remember?

Overall, I think anyone expecting the film to carry some weighty emotional punch aren’t going to be affected like they think they are. Much like the world it’s set in, The Road can be cold and distant, but there is some sense of solace in the end. The film tries its hardest to bombard you with scenes to provoke emotion, but it only occasionally goes far enough; the frights just aren’t that frightening, moments of desperation seem easily resolved with good timing and there’s far too much focus on the world that was and the wife that left them behind in selfishness depending on how you see things. The Road novel felt almost like oral history that hadn’t happened yet, The Road movie feels like Hollywood’s version. Unquestionably, it is made very well, but as I feared, the aesthetic couldn’t be translated whole.