Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is the kind of film that hovers over you like a cloud; it has the immensity of an epic, the density of a biblical exegesis and the mood of a surreal horror picture. Its two and a half hours go by smoothly and yet the movie has something of an irregular heartbeat; it might be called a high-strung impressionist’s dream of American Gothic.

The thirty-year saga begins in 1898, at which time Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) is an amateur oilman operating a small derrick in a forbidding Southwestern desert, although, from the look of it, the scene may as well have been placed among the Iraqi ruins where Father Merrin unleashed the demon in The Exorcist. When, after much toil and the loss of at least one life, black gold finally manifests itself in the manmade well, it’s as though it’s coming to life—it sputters and seethes as if in a witch’s cauldron—and a grandiose climax on the soundtrack registers its birth as an evil portent. (The music here echoes that which played when Jack Torrance entered the haunted hotel bar in The Shining.)

Within a few years, Plainview becomes a shrewdly professional oil prospector. He moves into communities and, flashing his leathery smile, boasting of his “frank” manner and status as an old-fashioned family man (he has adopted a dead miner’s son, though claims that the boy, H.W., is his), swindles the townsfolk out of their land.

After receiving a tip from Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), he slithers his way into Little Boston, California, and sets up a rig there. Even when the derrick goes ablaze—with an explosion that costs H.W. (Dillon Freasier) his hearing—Plainview is perfectly, maniacally happy; the earth is pregnant with a seemingly unlimited supply of oil, the lifeblood of the burgeoning American economy, as well as Plainview’s planned isolation from the rest of the human race. Put as simply as possible, the plot of There Will Be Blood is a stringing together of the oilman’s exploits at toppling everyone and everything around him in order to divorce himself from mankind.

Plainview has just what his name implies—a “competition” in him and a simple distaste for people—but the way the camera lingers on him suggests a deeper, stickier quality to his personality. I’m still trying to determine how much I like Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance; he has the uncanny ability to contort his jaw and control every furrow in his brow. It’s wildly theatrical and magnetic—as in Gangs of New York, where he came off as rather silly—and once again he’s topped it off with an absurd accent, something like a Tammany Hall caricature mixed with Sean Connery. Anderson doesn’t quite get it, either, but he loves to let Day-Lewis’ facial fluctuations fill the frame. Maybe it works because it’s such a grandiose, classical performance (mustachioed, he looks like a silent movie villain or Timothy Dalton from Hot Fuzz) and yet he touches on something behind the misanthropy and greed—as Plainview’s interspersed malice and tenderness in raising H.W. suggests. Because it’s so blatant, it’s a discomforting performance—it has the effect of when a friend says something offensive and you think initially that it’s a joke, but come to realize that he really means it. His wittiness and scariness are eerily inseparable.

Dano’s performance and role are equally oblique. His plaintive face looks even more like clay here than in Little Miss Sunshine and this nebulousness is both his menace and vulnerability. In Sunshine, Dano’s role as a psilosopher amounted to little more than stylized teen angst. When, here, as an evangelical preacher, he casts out a demon from a parishioner, Dano builds up a fury that’s eerily adolescent but nonetheless hypnotic to watch, reminiscent of both Gene Wilder and the somnambulist in Dr. Caligari. The character is either a phony or has the wrath of God on his side, and that spooks—more than spooks, infuriates—smug, satanic Plainview. Dano and Day-Lewis are most enjoyable together—their smarminess, deviousness and sheer energy complement one another (we are tickled by our inability to determine which character poses a greater threat to the other)—and when their dialogue overlaps, as it does in one scene, one can see Anderson tipping his hat to the late Robert Altman, to whom this film was dedicated.

The flaw with Dano’s part is that it’s actually—maybe—two. After Paul departs following his initial scene, Dano is thereafter known as Eli, Paul’s twin brother and the faith healer. Paul is never seen thereafter and only mentioned again much later. Unfortunately, despite the insistence of Dano and Anderson in interviews that the former plays two parts, the twin conceit is made entirely unclear in the movie; it has baffled critics and audiences so much that it’s found its way into being a subheading on the movie’s Wikipedia page. Before knowing of the controversy, I chalked off the duality as schizophrenia—and the friends I saw the movie with corroborated that theory. That, in my opinion, would have enriched the film more and helped explain some of Plainview’s incongruities, in particular an inexplicable scene where he wails on Eli Sunday.

This mistake may be glaring, but seems of little consequence when compared to the immensity of the picture and all that works because of—or despite—the film’s size. Technically, Anderson has matured in the decade since Boogie Nights when his camerawork was good, but often extraneously braggart. The tracking shots smoothly wander about, but pick up some arresting images, such as the inflamed geyser of oil and the tarred smile on Day-Lewis’ serpentine face, which radiates the orange glow as he watches the derrick burn.

The music, composed by Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood, is likewise brilliant and baroque and sinister; it’s downright phantasmagorical. It holds the dark-toned images together and keeps one’s mind in a liminal flux; it pulls the movie outside of both the early 1900s setting and the present, and prevents the audience from interpreting Anderson’s imagery at face value. In some movies, this can be a distraction, but here it keeps one on edge—captivated, but skeptical. Anderson invites you to do your own interpretation, wants your mind to wander into all sorts of dark corners.

There is so much going on here and it’s a remarkable feat on Anderson’s part that it resonates so well. There Will Be Blood was inspired by an eighty-year-old novel by Upton Sinclair, the early twentieth century socialist activist and author. Although Anderson has undoubtedly taken many liberties with the material (the implications of Plainview’s trade are quite topical), Sinclair’s influence is nonetheless felt. The names—Paul, Eli and Abel, their/his father—all carry meanings from the Bible. When Plainview discovers oil in the beginning, he smudges it on baby H.W.’s forehead like the ashes dusted on the foreheads of churchgoers in preparation for Eastertide. In the movie, the Church, as represented by Sunday (another, if somewhat more obviously, connotative name), and the avarice of capitalism, as represented by Plainview, are both shifty, abstruse creatures duking it out in front of the poor Little Boston townsfolk—at least in my humble estimation.

But that reading by no means makes the movie closed for interpretation; it’s wide, open, expansive and it encourages the viewer to take it upon him or herself to tool with its director’s ideas. Anderson has several firm conceptions of what he thinks the movie means, but he insists on engendering conversation, and that’s what makes a sophisticated artist. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford—which, out of the films I’ve seen, was the other giant of 2007—was similarly flexible. While that movie was sometimes a tad too obvious, this one was sometimes a tad too obscure. No matter; they’re both wonderfully solid and yet graciously democratic works. If dingbat Juno beats There Will Be Blood out for Best Picture, well, there will be blood.