There Will Be Blood A-

P.T. Anderson has said his There Will Be Blood is a horror film, and a horror film it is. A horror film about us. Us as Americans. Us as humans. And in his unbending, uncompromising, unblinking examination of power and domination, he serves us something much too real to be completely entertaining. Horror usually scares us by showing us what we are petrified is out there, waiting to devour us. Demonic child molestors. Insane cannibalistic psychologists. Sexually frustrated, repressed killers. Generally, things that go bump in the night. But Anderson takes it one step further, holding up a mirror to what we are scared is waiting within to devour us. “I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed,” says Daniel Plainview. It is a thesis statement, something rare in film, and we immediately resonate with it.

Technically, the film is perfect. The images are sparse, strong lines drawn to stand out in memory. Foremost of these is the night photography of an enflamed gusher with the outlines of the men shown in relief. The soundtrack, composed by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, is a dream, propelling the story forward with assonance and dissonance like a modern orchestra piece that’s not about harmonies and melodies, but about the affects of sound on our nervous systems. There are two scenes early on when the Texas landscape is shown and the soundtrack is all buzzing, hissing electronic noise, building in intensity, in which the sounds are as foreboding as any in film history. If you didn’t know before, you knew right then, this is a violent picture.

Daniel Day-Lewis continues his silent campaign to be the great actor of his generation with the iconic portrayal of Texas oilman Daniel Plainview. He’s in nearly every minute of the 160 here, and you never pull your eyes of his burning intensity. His odd, clipped speech, slow like a southerner but missing the twang, is a marvel. But it’s a certain physicality that he brings, rigid and taut like a carnivore circling its prey, and alone even when holding his child that is the real wonder. The film traces Daniel from his opening days prospecting for oil through the next thirty years as he acquires a son then a fortune.

More important than what Daniel gains is the soul he loses. When this happens isn't obvious, though it seems to begin when his son H.W. (young actor Dillon Freasier) loses his hearing in a gusher accident. The very moment that brings Daniel great power robs his young son of the little power he has and drives a communication wedge between them. It’s difficult to determine which affects Daniel more, but he seems to loathe the weakness he sees in his deaf son while blaming God for allowing it.

Some may question the portrayal of religion in the form of charismatic shyster revivalist Eli Sunday, played well by Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine), still, the religious charlatan certainly existed in the west, even as it does now. But why are we attracted to him when we know, deep down, he’s a phony? That’s the better question to ask.

There Will Be Blood challenges the two things Americans entrust their futures to: capitalism and religion. In so doing it reveals our deepest fears: that capitalism is really unbridled greed gussied up and religion is neither real nor capable of saving us from ourselves. A horror film indeed. A-