And poised on the bring of womanhood.
Yes. I am. I like to think i wont be a fully fledged adult til at least 25. so i have a few miles left in me of all-night whiskey binges. Monthly viewings of the Little Mermaid? Totally acceptable. Cute cartooned t-shirts from the kids section?– well go right ahead you fresh-faced little fledgling! I can still wear a tight tee with no bra (cheers to you my small boobie’d ancestry!) without looking like a sad caterpillar whose antennae are drooping down its front.
This aside, I am 22 years old and did not expect to watch a film last night that terrified me so badly I actually had nightmares. The film in question? No Country For Old Men. Winning four Academy Awards the year it came out, admittedly I’m a little late to the party… but this is a film that crawls in between your ribs, and leaves you with a strange uneasy feeling. The feeling after running hard, when your breathing slows back down, but your whole body is still prickling with adrenaline.
The film follows Lewellyn Moss, a hunter who chances upon a drug deal gone bloodily wrong. One man survives, he slumps wounded in the cab of a truck, gasping for water. Moss asks after the ‘ultimo hombre’, (the last man standing), then turns heel and walks away. A few hundred yards from the scene he finds him, dead, with a case holding $2 million.
From this point the film slows to a sickening crawl as Moss is pursued across Texas by ruthless psychopath Javier Bardem. Despite looking like half puma half Lego man awoken from the dead Bardem is TERRIFYING. Every innocuous word delivered in his laconic accented drawl is laced with danger. His coldness (checking his boots for blood as he stumps away from his latest execution), and relentlessness (briefly breaking the pursuit to perform self-surgery on a bullet wound), could be in danger of making him seem almost robotic… if he wasn’t so very human. The destruction around his eyes is enough to demonstrate this.
The film is full of kick-ass shots, a cashew nut wrapper slowly unfurling on a counter, observed as casually as the blood we see flowing across the motel room floor under Bardem’s carefully lifted boots. Still shots of punched out locks jolted me with more terror than any amount of gore I’ve seen played out in other pictures. The lack of music throughout builds a suffocating silence, making it all the more real.
The Coen Brothers have put together another superb thriller. While not entirely without gore the bloody imagery is not the focus, and the lack of a strings-based Horror Movie Soundtrack gives so much to the film, rather than detracting anything.
Bardem’s superb portrayal of Anton Chigurh will haunt my dreams for some time to come.
I would urge anyone to see this film, it really is outstanding.
