I worry about the fate of “The Road,” John Hillcoat’s film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic Pulitzer-winning novel.

It’s a moving and upsetting film – quality work that deserves to be in the Oscar hunt, both for Hillcoat’s work and for the shattering performance by its star, Viggo Mortensen.

But here’s the problem: It takes far fewer people to make a book a hit than a movie. A fraction. Serious fiction’s audience can be measured in the tens of thousands – the hundreds of thousands if the book strikes a chord, the millions if it’s that rarity that actually attracts a mass readership. Publishing’s audience is what independent film’s is becoming: literate and shrinking daily.

But movies measure success in millions. If all the people who read “The Road” subsequently went out and bought a ticket, that might constitute a sizable audience - for the first weekend of an arthouse hit. So fingers crossed that the film draws the kind of positive reviews it deserves (and this is one of those reviews) and attracts the kind of crossover audience that the book did.

The film has the same stripped-down feel as the book and a visual motif to match. The story is still deceptively simple: A man (Mortensen) and his son (Koki Smit-McPhee) trudge through the blasted landscape of a post-nuclear winter. The countryside is as gray as the sky; there is occasional rain, but the sky is always threatening and there is no sun. The ground is covered with a layer of what appears to be ash.

The pair approaches each day as a new adventure in their daily job: staying alive in this new reality, avoiding other people (who are scarce to begin with – and dangerously scary when encountered). Most of the people they see have succumbed to cannibalism, because there is little other food than humans.

Where are the man and his son headed? They’re not sure, though the father seem convinced that, if they can reach the coast, they’ll find food, clean water, perhaps a settlement of welcoming survivors.

In spare flashbacks, we get glimpses of the father’s life before whatever nuclear holocaust ended the world as he knew it. He and his wife (Charlize Theron) board themselves in, hoarding canned goods and surviving on their stash of supplies, even delivering their own baby. The disaster itself is never really shown or discussed.

“The Road” ultimately is an exploration of the need to survive, to keep going when doing so is frightening or impossible or pointless. What feeds the survival impulse in a dead-end situation? Is keeping one’s child safe enough to fuel that urge to keep going in this man? And to keep going in a way that allows him to tell his son, “We’re the good guys”?

Because ultimately, the journey involves the survival of more than just life – it’s life with a code, survival while clinging to humanity. And being forced to adjust the lines you’re willing to cross in order to survive and still be able to live with yourself.

Mortensen gives a haunting, haunted performance, as naked emotionally as anything he’s done until now. This is a character whose fears, courage and pain all lie right on the surface; he’s operating on a depleted auxiliary power source. Mortensen perfectly captures the effort to hide despair from his son and the anger he feels at himself during those moments when he can’t keep it in.

Smit-McPhee realistically plays a kid whose home-schooling consists of not doing anything to get himself or his father killed. There are cameos along the way by Robert Duvall, Garret Dillahunt and Michael Kenneth Williams, each sharp and intense and of the moment. The cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe hovers in some disturbing realm between monochrome and color.

“The Road” is serious drama, a film that takes a bleak, harrowing story and makes it tender and compelling. It’s too important a film to miss.

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