The very basic plot of No Country For Old Men is that of a drug deal gone very wrong — Llewelyn Moss finds and takes the money and is chased down by a hitman, Anton Chigurh, who means to take that money. Many killings and some ineffective law enforcement ensue.

I think the film is stunning on all accounts, but in consideration of the elements Ebert discusses, the placement of characters in the composition of each shot jumps out at me the most. Throughout the whole movie, most of the characters are on the strong axis, either very slightly right or left of center. Rather than pushing characters to the far left or far right, the Coen brothers tend to keep all of their characters just slightly off center, which works well with how we are supposed to read those characters, a reading that for me doesn’t really work along typical positive/negative or good/evil dichotomies.

I’ll focus on Chigurh, as he is in a lot of ways the most stiking. Chigurh is, as another character comments, “a psychopathic killer.” So he’s evil, right? Well, yeah, but not quite in the way of a typical villain. He murders seemingly arbitrarily, though he’s got a chilling logic behind his actions; he sometimes leaves the decision up to a coin toss which he makes the potential victim call to determine whether they will live or die. Chigurh is in a lot of ways not a character the way we may usually think of characters (as having stories/histories, motivations, etc) but an overwhelming force of (violent) chance.

Yet, he is portrayed in that stong axis position as much as any of the other characters, seemingly to add to our reading of the movie as not simply a tale of good vs. evil, but of the varying responses people have dealing with Chigurh and the arbitrariness of the world he represents.

This first clip is from fairly early in the movie. Chigurh has already dramatically killed two people and we expect similar violence to take place when he stops at this gas station:

You can see the character placement I was talking about earlier in this scene, though notably when the camera shifts to the gas station attendant, we can often still see part of Chigurh’s silhouette, hanging out ominously at the edge of the frame. We may be initially drawn to the brighter area, but I’d say this is definitely playing upon the intrinsic weighting of contrast that Ebert discusses. The scene also gives a great example of the suspense that’s built in the film — that the expected violence doesn’t happen here is more compelling than if literally everyone Chigurh encounters is murdered.

The second clip is another coin toss, this time from the end of the film:

Again, Chigurh is the darker of the character pair, sitting in shadow. And again, the switches between the two characters put them in roughly the same positions, with Chigurh slightly to the right. What I love most about this scene though is the way Chigurh checks the bottoms of his boots as he leaves the house. Throughout the film, there are several shots concerning feet and blood: the sheriff steps over a patch of blood on the floor very carefully at one point; during another sequence, Chigurh takes off his boots, then later his socks once they’ve been covered in blood; after another murder, we see blood moving across the floor and then Chigurh puts his feet up to avoid it. The murder is never shown, but there is little doubt that it happened — after such careful detail concerning blood on shoes, why else would he be concerned about his boots? So brilliant.

I’m a little bit unsure of where to put this film in terms of one genre, and I feel okay about that (TV Tropes has it under “genre busting”). But if I were to put it into a general category, Thriller/Crime will suffice, though many more words could be spent on all the different elements the film pulls from. As for more specific tropes, a handful from the Crime & Punishment trope list work, though they are more often played with or completely inverted. At one point Chigurh impersonates a police officer and later Moss runs for the Mexican border to escape.  A good example of an inverted one is the sheriff character, a trope which generally (and obviously) is associated with actual law enforcement and all the power that comes along with that, but the sheriff here is pretty much powerless, he has little agency and his “law enforcement” does little good.