No Survivalist's Wet-Dream...

I didn’t read anything last night, except subtitles - but I’ll come to that later.

The Road has been out on DVD for a few weeks now, so I was a little late jumping on the bandwagon, but jump I did.

For those who don’t know, The Road, adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s book of the same name, follows a father and his son as they try to survive in the wake of an unnamed apocalyptic event.

It’s grim, it’s grey and it’s harsh as hell.

This is a world in which nothing grows and the only signs of life happen to be other survivors who have lasted that long only by killing and eating the weak.

In such a brutal climate, you have to wonder what possesses the characters to stay alive but it’s not long before you realise that this urge is there conditionally. The father, known only as the Man, carries a revolver holding two bullets, one for him and one for his son, and the question is ever present - will he be able to pull the trigger when the time comes?

Although the many concepts in the film are nightmarish, much of the horror depicted in the book has been omitted in favour of placing the focus on the Man’s struggle to protect his son at all costs. Also, since the Man is clearly dying, it’s up to him to teach the boy how to live in his absence.

But it is the boy, ultimately, who is the teacher. His simple, polarised view of the world is a constant reminder to the Man that they are supposed to be the Good Guys and forces him to consider the moral cost of their survival.

I’ve always been a fan of apocalyptic fiction but unlike George A. Romero’s Dead Saga or the Mad Max series, The Road is no survivalist’s wet-dream. Survivalists barely come into the equation in this near-future dead world - here, God’s forgotten children simply pass the time until their inevitable starvation and the matter isn’t ‘how shall we continue to live?’, it becomes ‘when everything dies, what do we live for?’

Needless to say, once the credits rolled, I was pretty bummed out. I had to find something to lift my spirits and I found it on BBC4.

Storyville is a strand of international documentaries and this edition featured the trials and tribulations of the Swedish National Male Synchronised Swimming Team, hilariously entitled ‘Sync or Swim’.

The film follows Welsh film-maker, Dylan Williams, as he struggles against adversity in his new life in Stockholm. He’s about to hit 40 and all of the associated mid-life anxiety is crashing around him when he decides to pursue meaning with a group of similarly disenchanted Swedes.

Who cares, right?

Why on earth should I give a damn about a bunch of old men splashing around in a pool?

Trust me, I thought the same thing for the first ten minutes or so, but once you’re past that hurdle, you begin to warm to these underdogs and when they qualify for the World Championship in Milan, you start to wish you had a Swedish flag just so you can wave it around in support.

Check it out, it’s not a bad way to spend an hour of your life and if you don’t mind subtitles, it’s certainly more uplifting than watching the world slowly die.