The intersecting life stories of Daniel Plainview and Eli Sunday in early twentieth century California presents miner-turned-oilman Daniel Plainview, a driven man who will do whatever it takes to achieve his goals. He works hard but also takes advantage of those around him at their expense if need be.
With its lowering, psychotic atmosphere and its Bunyanesque surnames, There Will Be Blood is so potent and so strange that it almost seems to have been delivered here from another planet. I can only describe it as an epic portrait, running from the beginning of the 20th century to the great crash of 1929.
The movie speaks of oil's savage, entrepreneurial pre-history; in one haunted man, it shows our dysfunctional relationship with capital and natural resources, and even hints at a grim future in which our addiction to oil can no longer be fed. Daniel Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, a pioneer silver-miner who chances upon oil in 1898, a discovery he greets with a brief, leonine grin - one of the very few times he smiles.
Shrewdly, ruthlessly, Plainview parlays that initial stroke of good luck into a gigantic fortune, driven by pride and misanthropic contempt for everyone and everything around him. But Plainview has one vulnerability: he has an adopted son, named HW (Dillon Freasier), whom he loves and yet exploits. And he has an enemy: a smooth and sanctimonious young preacher, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), whose family ranch Plainview has had to buy to get at the oceans of oil underground.
dir: Paul Thomas Anderson
Year: 2007
country: US
run-time: 2h 38mins
rating: 18
Full £6.00
Concession: Pay What You Can
Doors 18:30 - Film 19:00