Almost a horror movie at times, this is one fantastic thriller and one of the Coens' best

Rating: 10/10 (11 November 2007)

I'm not sure one viewing can do this film justice. It leaves a lot to think about, and I spent a good portion of my Sunday reading other people's views to see if I can come to some sort of conclusion about it. But I can't yet. Well, I can come to the conclusion, in any case, that this is a fantastic movie. There's no doubt about that. The Coens go back to their darker, noir-inspired sides, making the barren Texas landscape feel as cold as the Minnesota winter. The central story has a Vietnam veteran, played by Josh Brolin, finding a bundle of cash on the scene of a drug deal gone wrong. Meanwhile, a methodical killer by the name of Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) hunts him down. On the sidelines is an aging sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) who works something like a Greek chorus, commenting on the main action but never able to have any effect on it. Looked at as a simple piece of film-making, No Country is brilliant. The Coens create a couple of the best setpieces they've ever done. They crank the tension up so high that I  along with the entire audience  was holding my breath. This is the closest thing the Coens have ever made to a horror movie, too. At times, it reminded me of a slasher, where we're waiting to see Chigurh dispose of his next victim in a gruesome way. But unlike your common director of a slasher movie, the Coens know how to make movies. It's not enjoyable when someone gets killed here. It feels all too realm and frankly it was scaring the hell out of me at times. Bardem plays the most memorable movie monster of the current decade. The character even sees himself as a monster, of sorts, as a hand of fate. In that way, Chigurh reminds me of another movie character, Ryunosuke Tsukue, Tatsuya Nakadai's character in Kihachi Okamoto's Sword of Doom. The two films share some similarities (surely unintentionally), for example the almost Brechtian dodge of a conventional climax that forces us to reconsider what  and who  the films are actually about. I think one big question that I've come up with is whether the film sees Chigurh as a force of nature, or whether it is just Chigurh seeing himself that way, and that he is as much subject to the forces of nature and fate as anyone else in the story. No Country started to lose me a little when it went after some big themes at the end. I feel like I didn't absorb everything there was, and maybe I just didn't "get" what the authors (the Coens and Cormac McCarthy, with whose work I'm entirely unfamiliar outside of this film) were going for. But I also have a sneaking suspicion that the big themes get a little lost, that the Coens don't accomplish everything they set out to do. But I am eager to see this again  and again  to see if I can work it all out.