In what could be one of Penn’s best directorial efforts, he adapts the story of 22-year-old Christopher McCandless (brilliantly played by Hirsch) from John Krakauer’s 1996 non-fiction book of the same name. Penn ingeniously ties together the graduate’s troubled past and questing present as McCandless’ empathetic sister (Malone) narrates over footage filmed when the siblings were younger.

After McCandless donates his life savings to Oxfam and cuts up his credit and identity cards, he leaves his comfortable Virginian life and ventures into the wild. He makes it through California, Arizona and South Dakota, meeting interesting characters along the way like hard-working wheat farmer Wayne Westerberg (Vaughn) and Ron Franz (Holbrook), a lonely old man with no next of kin. When Franz takes McCandless into his workshop and teaches him how to mould leather, they form a bond that results in the inevitable tear-jerking scene. Back on the road, McCandless finds an abandoned ‘magic school bus’ and makes it his home, where he hunts game, reads and writes. It is here that he is destined to spend his last days.

The foreboding of his demise is emphasised with Hirsch desperately adding holes in his belt to fit his emaciated frame. One freezing morning he wakes up abruptly, unable to comprehend the pain he’s in. As he rips through one of his books, he realises that he picked out poison berries the night before. By this point Penn has stripped the movie of its beautiful scenery and you’re forced to watch McCandless’s painful suffering in the rusty bus. In the last minutes of the film, the young man is hallucinating about reuniting with his parents. The camera pans out and you see the lone traveller surrounded by the beautiful wilderness he so longed for.

Dir Sean Penn 2007. USA. 148 mins. NC16. Emile Hirsch, Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Jena Malone, Catherine Keener, Vince Vaughn, Hal Holbrook.