This might just be this year’s best film. This might just also be the Coen Brothers’ best film, and they have made many fine ones. No Country for Old Men is probably about to be studied in detail in film schools for generations to come, a feat magnified still by the movie’s sticky subject matter and impact – this is no pleasure cruise, but a fascinated, almost bewildered study of the face of pure evil. It is neither pleasing, nor entertaining; it is riveting and hypnotic. It is free of the reassuring irony and cinematic mannerisms that often distinguish the Coen Brothers’ films. This time around their approach has the story stripped down to bare bones and told with pure unobtrusive film-making flair that you only really appreciate after you’ve left the cinema.

The film begins with the bemused and wounded comments of a Texas sheriff about a 14-year-old killer facing execution. The sheriff is shocked by the expanding invention of evil; he pines for the old days when evil seemed to have a more familiar face and had barriers it feared to cross. The sheriff named Ed Tom Bell is played by Tommy Lee Jones with his trademark sadness, authority and mastery of Texas vernacular that sucks you into the story. He is investigating a drug deal gone deadly wrong on his turf and a trail of dead bodies that stretches beyond the abandoned bullet-punctured trucks filled with neatly stacked bricks of heroin. Sheriff Bell notices that one thing is conspicuously missing – the money.

The money is taken by a poor hunter named Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who stumbles upon it and decides to make it his own. When he does so, however, he comes on the radar of one Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) who also wants the money and considers everyone crossing his path fair game. Chigurh feels no remorse or doubt about putting a cattle stungun to the forehead of any random terrified man diverting him from his mission. If chance, he considers, has brought somebody to him, then probably their time has come. Chigurh tracks down Moss with the unrelenting humourless precision of fate, or death. As one character with some knowledge of Chigurh says, “he has principles”.

The paths of Sheriff Bell, Moss and Chigurh cross in ways that would surprise viewers unfamiliar with Cormac McCarthy’s book on which the film is based. Those who are, I imagine, would be startled by how good a match the Coen Brothers have come up with for a source that is said to be “unfilmable”. Their meticulously constructed scenes morph into a remorselessly paced whole of palpable dread and suspense; you are unlikely to forget it any time soon. Consider a word game that Chigurh plays with an old man at a filling station where stakes are implied but never spelled out as a man’s fate may be decided by a toss of a coin. Or a scene in a motel room where Moss senses the dreaded presence that he simply cannot seem to evade.

You are also unlikely to forget the lanky hair, unflinching stare and indeterminately accented baritone of Bardem. Anton Chigurh is the most fascinating and frightening movie villain this side of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. Bardem’s bravery and single-mindedness in his approach to the role is so genuinely unsettling that it increases the effect of everyone else’s performance. We can easily believe the variations of his victims’ “You don’t have to do this,” or Moss’s defiance turning to terror, or Sheriff Bell’s sad resignation to implacable and unavoidable injustice. Add to this the stark visual beauty of Roger Deakins’ photography and Carter Burwell’s discreet score, which knows the menacing value of silence, and No Country for Old Men becomes a disquieting instant classic.