There Will Be Blood Review

Anderson opens with roughly fifteen minutes of no dialogue at all, a man alone in a hole with a pickaxe and a broken leg, and Jonny Greenwood's strings sawing over it in dissonant clusters that announce this will not be a conventional period drama. Robert Elswit shoots the derricks and the scrubland with a hard dusty clarity, and the burning well is staged practically at enormous scale, lit almost entirely by the fire itself. Daniel Day-Lewis builds Plainview out of an oratorical cadence and a limp, a man whose only genuine emotion is competition, and Paul Dano matches him far more often than he gets credit for.

Structure is the weakness. The middle drifts through the half-brother subplot without much tension, the time jump strands the audience, and the bowling alley finale swings so hard into grotesque comedy that it fractures the tone many viewers had settled into. That fracture is deliberate and still costly. Monumental performance, magnificent images, a slightly unruly film assembled around them.