For Fans of No Country for Old Men

Most thriller antagonists can be stopped by the right combination of luck and cleverness. Chigurh cannot. The Coens and Javier Bardem present him not as a sadist enjoying the work, but as something closer to logic itself: a man who decided what the world is and then became consistent with that decision. That is what makes the film philosophically unnerving rather than simply violent. Ed Tom Bell's final monologue is not a eulogy for a lost case. It is a man admitting that the world was never what he thought it was.

The landscape in the film is not backdrop. The flat light, the dust, the distance between human beings: these are load-bearing. The Coens shot on location in New Mexico and West Texas with Roger Deakins, who won nothing for it at the time and deserved everything. The emptiness communicates that no one is coming to help, that the rules of civilization are thin, and that whatever happens here will not be witnessed. McCarthy's novel does the same work with prose stripped of quotation marks and sentiment.

Chigurh's coin tosses have been read as a commentary on fate, on randomness, on nihilism. But the more interesting reading is simpler: he offers people the coin because he does not want to make the decision himself. He has constructed a personal philosophy and the coin is how he maintains it without having to feel its weight. When Carla Jean refuses to call it, she refuses to participate in that philosophy. It is the most defiant act in the film. It costs her everything and it is the moral center of the story.