The Last of Us, review: dystopian thriller is the greatest video game adaptation ever made

To my shame I have never played The Last of Us, the video game on which HBO's latest blockbuster series is based (Sky Atlantic). It's an action-adventure game about a middle-aged man escorting a teenage girl across a post-apocalyptic America, in a world which has been ravaged by a mutated fungus that turns people into zombies. For the quality of its world-building and storytelling, The Last of Us is widely thought to be one of the greatest video games ever made. Whether you think of yourself as a gamer or not, from Red Dead Redemption to Elden Ring, today some of the great narrative and aesthetic experiences are video games. If you are not playing them, you're missing out as surely as if you opt out of opera.  

Translating video games to the screen, however, has a mixed past, which is to say it has been mostly terrible. For every bit of passable pulp, as in the first Tomb Raider film, there is a Hitman or a Sonic the Hedgehog or a Mortal Kombat. The qualities that make games fun to play are not a reliable basis for moving pictures. But The Last of Us always had loftier aspirations. For the TV version the game's creator, Neil Druckmann, has teamed up with Craig Mazin, the writer best known for 2019's Chernobyl. While it might technically have been a historical drama, Chernobyl was elevated by its pervasive atmosphere of dread and scenes of unforgettable horror: helicopters hovering above cooling towers, molten reactor cores, faces burned off by radiation. 

Those same qualities are evident here. Pedro Pascal plays Joel, a single father living in a small town in Texas in 2013 when the fungus hits. Twenty years later, he is living in the fortified remains of what used to be Boston, where he subsidises work shovelling corpses with a bit of smuggling. The city is a violent place, where the infected are put down, criminals are hanged and the authorities, called Fedra, battle with freedom fighters calling themselves Fireflies. Joel is introduced to Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a spirited 14-year-old with a potentially world-changing secret: despite having been bitten by an infected, she is apparently immune to the fungus. The leader of the local Fireflies asks Joel to smuggle her out of the city to a safe haven, where she might help scientists to make a vaccine. Joel agrees because he wants to find his brother, Tommy, who is living somewhere out west.

If the plot is similar to Children of Men, the horrors of an America without law are more reminiscent of The Road, Cormac McCarthy's acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel. "There's worse things than infected out there," a character says early on, and they are right. There is beauty in the ruins of the city – flocks of birds swoop past vine-glad skyscrapers – but monsters lurk around every corner. The zombies are fearsome: no ambling goons but snarling, sprinting things. As in Alex Garland's Annihilation, in merging the human with the natural world, the fungus creates memorably uncanny scenarios, including one of the more horrifying kisses you'll ever see. Pascal and Ramsey are well matched as the unlikely buddy act: Pascal provides his usual gruff charm, while Ramsey, previously best known for a minor but beloved role as the young Lady Lyanna Mormont in Game of Thrones, conveys warmth as well as wisecracks.

Although the drama mixes up the narrative with flashbacks – including an unexpected film-within-a-film in episode three – The Last of Us's origins as a game are occasionally visible in the relentless sequence of challenges that Ellie and Joel must face. At nine episodes, it feels a little long, even if it is truncated compared to its source material. But in its scale, depiction of dread and its believable vision of friendship in disaster, The Last of Us is a rare piece of television: an adaptation that makes you want to rush out and play the game.

The Last of Us begins on Sky Atlantic on Monday 16 January