KEY POINTS:
Herald rating: * * * * *
Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Kevin J. O'Connor, Ciaran Hinds
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Running time: 158 minutes
Rating: R13, violence and content may disturb
Screening: Rialto
Verdict: Day-Lewis' mesmerising performance is the pulsing heart of a truly great American film.
If this doesn't end up as the best film of the year it will still be the one with the most ludicrously inappropriate title.
"There Will Be Blood" was the tagline on one of the Saw slasher movies and it is a colossal misjudgment to append it to this.
But that's the only false step. The year's second bona fide masterpiece (after the Coens' No Country For Old Men), it's exhilarating, jaw-dropping and audacious - an instant American classic.
Day-Lewis, famously unprolific and obsessively perfectionist (he has learned to skin wild animals and butcher meat for roles), is a fine match for Anderson, who here departs from his whimsical, faintly surreal LA stories to make a period film inspired by (rather than an adaptation of) Upton Sinclair's impassioned, politicised 1927 novel Oil!
The actor plays Daniel Plainview - the film is full of names, like Sunday, rippling with allegorical muscle - whom we meet in 1898 as he toils alone in the shaft of a silver mine.
The first 20 minutes are wordless but not soundless: sparks fly from the pick-axe and it's all dust and dynamite, and Radiohead guitarist and composer Jonny Greenwood has forged a haunting soundtrack that ratchets the tension to breaking point.
Then a rung on Plainview's ladder breaks. What unfolds over the next two hours (of which not a moment feels superfluous) is the history of modern America located in the story of one man.
Limping on a broken leg he never bothered to set, Plainview is a landbound Ahab, a man possessed by a singular vision and an unshakeable determination.
Slowly he graduates from a wildcat oil prospector into a smooth-talking persuader in a Model T, talking people into selling land rich in oil they know nothing about.
By the time he has become a tycoon indistinguishable from a psychopath, we realise that in Plainview is located the whole story of how capitalism simultaneously made and destroyed America.
Along the way the film explores business' unholy alliance with religion in a way that is both powerful and bitterly pointed.
Day-Lewis' performance beggars all praise. Chewing on the lines in Anderson's poetic, eerily theatrical script, he creates a character of Shakespearean grandeur.
He seems to incarnate a mid-century John Huston, yanking us back to a time when epic was the movies' native language and character ruled.
But this is also, and profoundly, a moviemaker's film: particularly in the sequences of work, in which blood and sweat and sweet crude mix and no one speaks, it is pure retina-searing cinema. Enthralling.
