ROAD

Synopsis

Two ex-lovers set out on a road trip when Margaret (Catherine Kellner), a freelance photographer, gets her first big assignment: to survey environmental clean-up sites using the latest government-issued technology. Jay (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), her unemployed ex-boyfriend, comes along for the trip that increasingly goes awry. As they travel into a landscape filled with one abandoned environmental disaster after another, painful memories of their troubled relationship begin to emerge and the couple plunge into an emotional and physical limbo. Suddenly, backroads lead to nowhere, equipment fails, and Margaret and Jay inexplicably encounter the same foreboding characters over and over again, including a country music-loving-toxic-waste-hauling-big-rig driver (Peter Appel), and a doomed park ranger (James Urbaniak). Like Dante's The Inferno, an inspiration for the film, the couple circle through what looks and feels like a hell on earth as they try to navigate the roads between toxic waste sites and damaged love. Forced to confront the wasteland of their failed relationship, as well as their relationship to the environment and the world at large, the couple finally experience a long-deferred coming of age. With its stylized narrative, compelling performances, and supernatural backdrop, ROAD brings us to the heart of a disturbing social issue in an evocative story for our times.