10 Movies Where Evil Won

7. No Country For Old Men

Much has been written about Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), the antagonist of the Coen brothers' Best Picture-winning western, with many noting him to represent both the "unstoppable evil" trope recurrent in author Cormac McCarthy's novels, and also the inevitability of both violence and death.

Chigurh's mission throughout the movie is to recover a satchel of money from a drug deal gone wrong, sending him on a collision course with both Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), who stumbles across the cash, and an in-over-his head Sheriff, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones).

Some may argue that Chigurh's methods - whereby he decides the fate of anyone he crosses with a coin flip - are too random to be evil, but McCarthy and the Coens seem to ultimately leave it up to the audience to decide. After all, the coin isn't killing anyone by itself.

The film ends with Moss dead and the implication that Chigurh escaped with the money, while a defeated Bell is simply left to his own devices. Chigurh is involved in a nasty car accident before he leaves town, but it's quite clear that he makes a clean(ish) getaway regardless.

This is precisely why more casual audiences found the film so challenging - Brolin's more conventional action hero is gunned down off-screen a good while before the end credits roll, Jones doesn't step up and have a final showdown with the brutal antagonist, and as for the antagonistic force itself, it passes through Texas mostly unimpeded.