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But everybody will leave the theater raving about Javier Bardem, who plays the sinister slaughterer. There's a wild light in Chigurh's eyes and even a hint of a smile as he torments his soon-to-be-victims. Looking like the worst descendant of the Addams Family, he's a fearsome freak, as unstoppable as those black thunderstorms we see sweeping across the desert.

Chigurh marches from target to target, knocking off his victims one by one with a tank of compressed air and a hose—a weapon that is almost silent and definitely deadly. His view of the world is frightfully mechanical: He carries out his rituals without any exceptions, and the only chance he gives his targets depends on the flip of a coin. Mercy? Compassion? Forgiveness? Those concepts don't exist in his vocabulary. He loves to watch his victims squirm. (Even crumpled candy wrappers twitch and writhe in his presence.)

The scenes in which Chigurh stalks Moss are as suspenseful as anything the Coens have ever staged. And that has as much to do with what we hear as what we see. No Country for Old Men lacks a traditional soundtrack, but don't say it doesn't have music. The blip-blip-blip of a transponder becomes as frightening as the famous theme from Jaws. The sound of footsteps on the hardwood floors of a hotel hallway are as ominous as the drums of war. When the leather of a briefcase squeaks against the metal of a ventilation shaft, you'll cringe, and the distant echo of a telephone ringing in a hotel lobby will jangle your nerves.

Filmmakers Ethan Coen and Joel Coen on set

In spite of masterful sound design, and brilliant cinematography by Roger Deakins (who also shot The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford), it's what we don't hear or see that makes No Country so haunting. Love, hope, and Almighty God—they seem to be missing in action.

The silence of God may, in fact, have been the mystery foremost on McCarthy's mind. Following Chigurh on his rampage through the desert, the author offers only a few possible conclusions:

• God might be so disgusted with humankind that he's decided to keep his distance and let us destroy each other;
  
  
• God might be trying to reach into the world through fleeting gestures of human benevolence—like Carla's steadfast love for her stupid husband, or a young boy's kindness in offering his shirt to a bleeding victim; or,
  
  
• God just might not exist at all.

Powerfully faithful to the McCarthy's text, the Coens have given us their bleakest work to date. At first it feels like familiar territory, with numerous references to their previous works. Like Raising Arizona's "Lone Biker of the Apocalypse," Chigurh happily blasts small animals with a shotgun as he roars down the highway. The guilty and the innocent try to talk their way out of execution, just as they did in Miller's Crossing. Stephen Root (TV's Newsradio), who made the Soggy Bottom Boys a recording sensation in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, plays the everpresent Coen Brothers caricature: The Man Behind the Big Desk. And Sheriff Bell, world-weary as he is, might be related to Fargo's Marge Gunderson.

And yet, in spite of these similarities, we've never seen the Coens descend so far into the abyss of human depravity. Their primary endeavor—from Blood Simple to Miller's Crossing, from O Brother Where Art Thou? to The Big Lebowski—has always been to ask if the human heart might discover grace in a world spoiled by greed, murder, and folly. Mining the brittle stone of McCarthy's nihilistic narrative, the Coens can't find any trace of hope.

"You can't stop what's coming," a prophetic old man tells Sheriff Bell. And Bell, so proud of his heritage of lawmen, is miserable at his insufficiency. "It ain't all waitin' on you," the old man cautions him. "That's vanity." And we're left facing questions that haunt so many great works of art: Who is the world waiting on? If God exists, why doesn't he intervene to prevent such apocalyptic violence? Whatever the answers might be, No Country for Old Men suggests that truth, justice, and the American way are not enough to save us from the dark and deadly winds of change.

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