Pitch black soul of capitalism

Rating: Null/10 (11 April 2020)

This film starts with a dark, almost demonic foreboding of doom and evil, accompanied by the harsh landscape and harsher score. The title also warns us of almost Biblical level horrors to come. An oil prospector works with grim determination, falls and presumably breaks his leg, finds oil and broken leg or no, somehow crawls to the claims office to stake his claim. This accident is the first of several. We see the human animal at it's lowest and meanest throughout the 150 minutes of this bitter film. The bottomless pit of capitalistic greed is pitted against religion, and if the first here defeats the latter - which is shown to be far from truly pious anyway - it does so by simultaneously destroying itself. The oil man's last line is 'I am finished' - and he truly is. He never really stopped falling ever since that first drop in the shaft. This is a riveting, nasty film, though there is some light in the almost fairy tale love that develops in the background between the oil man's adopted son and the preacher's younger sister, both of whom offer a ray of innocence in the general nastiness. The tale of the oil man's long lost brother adds one more nail in this coffin of human misery and despair. Performances by all are very fine with Paul Dano walking a fine line between innocence and cunning, while Daniel Day Lewis shows the human animal trapped by its own pride, greed and ambition into an almost frenzied desire to step all over its fellows, till there's no one left to threaten it's isolation.