Some films argue that ambition corrodes the soul. There Will Be Blood does something stranger and more frightening: it watches a man get everything he ever wanted and reveals that the wanting was the whole life, and that there was never anything underneath it. Daniel Plainview strikes oil, builds an empire, buries every human tie that might have slowed him down, and ends the story alone on the floor of a private bowling alley, muttering that he is finished. He is right. He has won.

Paul Thomas Anderson opens on a silence almost no mainstream American film would risk — some fifteen minutes with barely a word, a lone prospector clawing silver, then oil, out of the ground while Jonny Greenwood’s strings saw and shudder on the soundtrack like something being pried open. It is a statement of intent. This will be a film about surfaces and depths, about what men dig for and what they become in the digging, told with the patience of a director who trusts an image to carry a theme no dialogue could.

Daniel Day-Lewis gives one of the definitive screen performances of the century, and he does it without ever asking to be liked. His Plainview is a con man with a genuine gift, a father who weaponises his own child, a voice — that rolling, John Huston baritone — that can sell a town on a pipeline and, moments later, curdle into pure contempt. The performance is enormous but never loose: every gesture is aimed. It is impossible to imagine the film existing without the specific gravity he brings to a man who is, finally, all appetite and no floor.

Against him Anderson sets Paul Dano’s Eli Sunday, a young preacher whose faith is its own kind of racket. The film’s real subject emerges in their collisions: oil and religion as rival American churches, each promising salvation, each running on performance and fear. The baptism and the final confrontation in the bowling alley are two halves of one argument about who gets to own a man’s soul — and the answer the film gives is bleak, funny, and merciless.

There Will Be Blood (2007), directed by Paul Thomas Anderson — There Will Be Blood (2007)

Robert Elswit’s cinematography turns the California scrubland into something biblical and pitiless, all bleached sky and black eruption; the derrick fire that steals H.W.’s hearing is one of the great images of modern film, and it won Elswit an Academy Award. Dylan Tichenor’s editing lets scenes breathe to an almost unbearable length, then cuts on a cruelty. And Greenwood’s score — dissonant, anachronistic, closer to a horror film than a period drama — is the secret engine, refusing to let the audience settle into the comfort of a costume picture.

Loosely adapted from Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel Oil!, the film keeps the derricks and discards the politics. Sinclair wanted a systemic indictment; Anderson wants the portrait of one soul hollowing out. What survives the translation is the sense that American wealth is built on a fundamental loneliness — that Plainview’s contempt for other people is not a flaw in the capitalist but its purest expression.

It endures because it refuses consolation. There is no redemption arc, no lesson learned, only the slow revelation that the man was empty from the first frame. The line everyone quotes — the milkshake, the drainage, delivered as Plainview finally drops all pretense — has hardened into pop-culture shorthand, but stripped of the meme it is genuinely terrifying: the sound of a human being who has consumed everything within reach and is still hungry. Poll after poll of critics now ranks it among the finest films of its century.

There Will Be Blood is not a warm film, and it does not want to be. It is a cold, formally fearless piece of work about the price of getting exactly what you asked for — and it earns every inch of its reputation. This is essential cinema, the rare modern film that already feels carved in stone.