Father and son travel through a bleak landscape in search of a hazy vision of a better life in a dying world and are repeatedly confronted with the transformations of human morality. An unnamed global event has turned the earth into a gray hell filled with random earthquakes and collapsing forests, and a boy is born into this new reality. A few years later, the same boy struggles - along with his father - for survival on the way south, coping with a radically changed state of society. Their effort not to succumb to moral decay is put to the test in every confrontation with a stranger. In the shadow of rampant cannibalism, both survive on precious canned goods and the fragile certainty that they retain their humanity despite the circumstances.