No human presences are seen in the opening moments of this film; only shots of a sere, sun-baked, uninviting landscape. On the soundtrack, a string section keens, scurrying up a ladder of discord, reaching a crescendo of pure volume, and falling off. This activity heralds the coming of Daniel Plainview, who is in a hole in the lower ground of that uninviting landscape.

By the end of There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson's entirely extraordinary fifth feature film, Plainview will inhabit another hole in the ground of sorts, a more lushly appointed one, one of his own design, but a hole nonetheless. In the first hole, he's a not particularly prosperous silver miner; in the last one, he's a hugely successful oilman.

Blood tells Plainview's peculiar, appalling story (which Anderson adapts from a portion of Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!) in a series of perfectly conceived and structured narratives, starting at the turn of the 19th century and winding up in the 1920s. Plainview's forays for silver become forays for oil. He acquires, through means we can only really piece together once the film is over, a son, a cute little fellow he uses as a prop when he wants to convince the people whose land he wants to drill into that he's both an oilman and a family man. And he lets the little fellow, named H.W. and played for the most part by Dillon Freasier, listen in on business meetings much of the time. Into one such meeting oozes a weedy young man named Paul Sunday (Dano), who has information for Plainview and Plainview's right hand man Fletcher (Hinds) about a stretch of California land that sits on top of a virtual sea of oil. Much of the rest of the film depicts Plainview's conquest of that land, and his frequent wrestlings with Paul's identical brother Eli, a preacher at the self-created Church of the Third Revelation.

Eli's constant demands for attention, respect, and money make him something of a querulous second son to Plainview. In the midst of their wranglings, H.W. suffers a mishap that alters his relationship to his father forever. A man claiming to be Plainview's brother arrives at the ever-expanding site, and the heretofore very definite but largely buttoned-up Plainview (who has no trouble revealing his ambitions to Fletcher in the first person singular, as if Fletcher has no stake in them — doesn't exist, even) opens himself to the man. "I have a competition in me; I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people. There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking. I've built up my hatreds over the years little by little. I see the worst in people. I don't need to look past seeing them to get all I need. I want to earn enough money I can get away from everyone. I can't keep doing this on my own, with these... people." Soon Plainview will have reason to reconfirm his dislike of people. And he will also grow rich enough to get away from everyone, and stay there, until someone who once forced a humiliation upon him comes calling with hat in hand.

There Will Be Blood has all the trappings of a conventional, albeit inspired, period epic. The production design by Jack Fisk, who's worked on all of Terrence Malick's films, is meticulously and beautifully detailed. Robert Elswit's widescreen cinematography often has an epic sweep. Certain scenes, such as the out-of-control gushing of an oil well that Plainview sees (correctly) as his vindication have a vigor and a pull that recalls the big-scale classicism of Lean. But There Will Be Blood is, in fact, not a historical saga; rather, it's an absurdist, blackly comic horror film with a very idiosyncratic satanic figure at its core. Daniel Day-Lewis's Plainview may *BLEEP* his eye and speak rather like a movie monster from years past — John Huston's Noah Cross in Chinatown, specifically. (Anderson's spoken of Huston's own The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as an influence on this picture.) But Day-Lewis isn't enacting any kind of homage. Once his work as Plainview takes wing, the relentless focus of the performance makes the character unique. Which is key, because his interactions with other characters are nothing like anything you see in films today. Blood is, at its heart, a series of very personal confrontations between Plainview and the world around him, and the exchanges therein are tense indeed.

This movie isn't anything like Anderson's previous films (Boogie Nights, Magnolia), at least not superficially; there's nobody from his unofficial repertory company in it (even though an actor such as Philip Baker Hall, for instance, would fit right into the picture's milieu); nobody sings, unless they're in church. (There's also zero profanity, a bit of a rejoinder to Deadwood, which couldn't conjure a scintilla of this film's darkness.) But what there is from Anderson's other films is a lower-key version of the tense dread he evokes in, say, the Alfred Molina sequence of 1997's Boogie Nights. "What the hell is this," a viewer might ask him- or herself, with some discomfort, as a particular scene proceeds along deliberately before veering off into a Plainview-erected wall of insanity. Or is it, really, insanity? At the end of the film, as Plainview explains to his sad-sack visitor why he will not, indeed cannot, do anything for him, the ridiculousness of his would-be pedagogy approaches something out of Ionesco's The Lesson. And yet, Plainview is right. He's right throughout, in his awful way.

Anderson dedicates this film to his late friend and mentor, the director Robert Altman. Which is entirely apt but a little ironic, as it is likely the least Altmanesque film Anderson has ever made. Gone too is the humanistic touch of Jonathan Demme, a director Anderson has often professed to admire as much as Altman. Johnny Greenwood's remarkable score, its sonics often reminiscent of composers Penderecki, Ligeti, and Bartok, combined with the sometimes alien-looking landscapes Anderson puts on screen, have inspired some comparisons to Kubrick. The resemblances are there, true, but Anderson's not nearly as detached from this created world as Kubrick could be from his. That's what makes Blood such a frightening and mordantly funny experience — Anderson's refusal to look down on Plainview goes hand in hand with his refusal to rationalize him.

Vladimir Nabokov once observed, "Teachers of literature are apt to think up such problems as 'What is the author's purpose?' or still worse 'What is the guy trying to say?'" That doesn't just go for literature, and I fear that There Will Be Blood is likely to fall victim to quite a bit of "What is the guy trying to say?" business. Is Plainview a personification of the excesses of capitalism? Could be. I don't know and I don't care. All I know is that this film invaded my consciousness (literally — I had a dream about it the first night I saw it, a very rare occurrence) and still has a tight, daunting grip on it.