Review of No Country for Old Men (2007) by Jillian B — 18 Jul 2017

It is hard to watch No Country For Old Men. It's teeth-clenchingly intense and pretty bloody. It's hard to get your audience to cringe during fight scenes and I think I may have cringed more from this movie's sheer intensity, bloody violence aside, (in a good way) than any other movie, besides maybe Dogtooth or Hard Candy.

No Country is a pretty special movie, as it manages to make you afraid to go to sleep without putting anything supernatural in it. It reminds you how we as humans can do evil that the most disquieting horror movie can't even come close to portraying.

Part of its ability to unnerve, too, is that all of this could really happen. The Cohens successfully threw together a western and a horror movie at the same time, the plot of which being completely plausible in real life.

It has a sort of godlike figure as the villain, and it is supposed reminds us that the world works in mysterious ways, I think. Watching this movie, I couldn't help but think of the ancient myths in which gods visited regular people, disguised as humans.

That must be how Tom Bell and Lewellyn Moss felt as their lives began to revolve around this man, Anton Chigurh, coming after them. This movie is very manipulative. It's almost sadistic the way that it enjoys using the plot to punch you emotionally.

There is a reason why this movie won best picture, and it's one that everyone who loves dark movies should watch. It's hard to get a whole lot darker, or smarter, than this.