50 Movies Where Evil Won

Plot: When Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) steals some money from a drug deal gone wrong, it unleashes a chaotic storm of violence and bloodshed that will leave many innocent people dead.

Finally, there's No Country for Old Men, an absolute masterpiece and one of the most perfect pieces of cinematic nihilism ever. It ranks among the bleakest American films of all time.

The key evil in the movie is the completely terrifying Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a sociopathic hitman who could best be described as the embodiment of pure evil. He murders scores of innocent people throughout No Country for Old Men, including Moss' wife (Kelly MacDonald), who didn't do anything wrong at all.

Sheriff Ed Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is the character a more conventional film would've cast as the hero, but he's powerless all the way through. He's too late to save Moss, who's killed by a group of Mexicans also hunting for the money, and he fails to catch Chigurh, who gets away with everything. By the end of the picture, Bell has retired, sickened by all the violent cruelty he's witnessed. 

Some viewers were frustrated with the movie's anticlimactic third act, including the absence of any sort of final showdown, but this was absolutely deliberate. The denial of any satisfaction only makes it all even more miserable. It's a bruising work of immense power, the kind of film that will shake the optimism of even the most positive viewers. 

Evil wins, and it's shattering.