There Will Be Blood (2007)
There Will Be Blood arrived in late 2007 carrying the kind of quiet, serious weight that tends to announce itself without needing to shout. Paul Thomas Anderson's sixth feature is a period drama set across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rooted loosely in Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!, though Anderson strips the source material back to its bones and rebuilds it almost entirely in his own image. The backdrop is the California oil boom, a chapter of American history that reads like myth: fortunes conjured from desert earth, communities upended overnight, and men of extraordinary will and negligible scruple rising to the top of a new and ruthless economy. It is the kind of era that invites big filmmaking, and Anderson, working with a budget in the region of twenty-five million dollars (modest by the standards of the spectacle on screen), was clearly not in the mood to think small.
Anderson had, by this point, already demonstrated a remarkable range. From the San Fernando Valley ensemble sprawl of Boogie Nights and Magnolia to the quieter, stranger register of Punch-Drunk Love, his career had followed no predictable line. There Will Be Blood represented something of a departure even from that varied back catalogue: leaner in cast, more austere in construction, and far more interested in the psychology of a single man than in the interlocking lives of many. It was produced under the Paramount Vantage banner alongside Miramax and Anderson's own Ghoulardi Film Company, and shot largely on location in Marfa, Texas, standing in for the sun-scorched, oil-rich plains of turn-of-the-century California. Robert Elswit, Anderson's long-standing cinematographer, won the Academy Award for his work here, and it is not hard to see why.
The cast is, by design, a spare one. Ciarán Hinds appears in a supporting role, and Kevin J. O'Connor provides texture as a man whose relationship with Daniel Plainview is one of the film's more quietly unsettling threads. Young Dillon Freasier, a non-professional actor found by the production during a local casting search, holds his own opposite one of the most formidable screen presences of his generation. That presence is, of course, Daniel Day-Lewis, an actor whose reputation for total immersion in a role had by 2007 become something close to legend. His work here is physical and volcanic where it needs to be, and cold and watchful where it doesn't, a performance that operates on several registers at once without ever seeming to strain. Opposite him, Paul Dano takes on the role of Eli Sunday, a young preacher with his own brand of ambition, and the friction between the two men gives the film its central dramatic charge. If you enjoy watching film performances that feel genuinely dangerous, this is a picture that rewards close attention. For a sense of how Day-Lewis-level commitment to character sits alongside similar American period epics, it is worth having a look at our review of Gangs of New York (2002), which explores comparable themes of ruthless ambition and the violent founding of an American identity. And for another study in the particular appeal of a deeply driven, morally compromised protagonist doing terrible things with complete conviction, our take on Nightcrawler (2014) makes for an interesting companion piece.
The plot of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 epic There Will Be Blood is, on paper, staggeringly simple. A man finds oil, drills it, and gets rich. Yet, Anderson takes this bare-bones premise and spins it into a towering, standalone classic of modern cinema.
Daniel Day-Lewis is at the absolute peak of his powers here, playing Daniel Plainview, a man whose discovery of black gold kickstarts a relentless, all-consuming obsession. It is a story of empire-building, staggering success, and profound, isolating loss, all driven by a performance that is nothing short of astonishing.
What truly elevates the picture is the sheer, oppressive atmosphere Anderson builds from the very first frame. The cinematography is undeniably beautiful, capturing the stark, unforgiving landscapes of early 20th-century America with a painterly, almost tactile eye. But it’s the underlying threat in the seemingly mundane moments that really gets under your skin. You’ll be watching a scene that is nothing but two men talking across a wooden table, and yet the tension is ratcheted up to a breaking point. A massive part of that is down to Jonny Greenwood’s fantastic, discordant score. It pulses and scrapes, perfectly knowing when to tighten the noose and when to offer a brief, deceptive moment of calm.
Then we have the perfect counterweight to Day-Lewis’s towering presence: Paul Dano. I know a fair few critics have historically had a bone to pick with Dano’s theatrical style, but I think he is a genuinely fantastic actor, and he is absolutely brilliant here. As the snivelling, ambitious young pastor Eli Sunday, he provides the exact friction Plainview needs. Their dynamic is the venomous, beating heart of the film. Watching these two circle each other, trading barbs and thinly veiled threats, is a brilliant display of screen acting. It’s a genuine enigma, really, watching such profound, raw emotion being projected by a character who is entirely devoid of it.
Ultimately, this is a near-perfect piece of filmmaking. If I had to find a single flaw, it would be that the very simplicity of the plot, which serves as one of its greatest strengths, can occasionally make the narrative feel a touch sparse when you consider the sum of it all. But that is a microscopic quibble in the face of such a monumental achievement. Anderson has crafted a deeply affecting, visually stunning character study that lingers in the mind long after the credits roll. It is a cracking, unforgettable cinematic experience.
There Will Be Blood sits comfortably in the company of the great American character studies, a polished but unrelenting piece of work that asks serious questions about greed, faith, and the cost of building something from nothing. It is the sort of film that film criticism tends to reach for when making arguments about what the medium can do at its best, and it largely justifies that reputation. Whether it is entirely to your taste will depend on your appetite for deliberate pacing and a certain operatic bleakness, but there is no serious argument to be made that it is anything other than exceptional craft. Some films leave you thinking. Some leave you quiet. This one, rather memorably, leaves you with the sound of bowling pins.
Rating: ★★★★½ | Year: 2007 | Watched: 2026-08-06
Trailer
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