Hollywood's treatment of America's trademark tycoons has always drawn the line at painting them as unmitigated monsters.

From Citizen Kane through to The Aviator's Howard Hughes, they've been deliriously driven, avaricious...yet always had some humanising chink in their corporate armour.

Not so Daniel Plainview. A veneer of good ol' charm cynically masks a black soul that will not countenance anything - or anyone - stopping him getting what he wants.

And what he wants is oil.

Craftily working his way up from dusty prospector to roving oilman, Plainview (Day Lewis), with his bristling moustache and courtly manner, drives the hardest of bargains. Which he then doesn't keep.

His spiel is worthy of the shiftiest con artist and he even sneakily acquires the orphaned son of a dead employee to convince dollar delirious simple folks to go into partnership with this gold-hearted single dad.

However, when Plainview rooks pimply preacher Eli Sunday (Dano) out of $5,000 pledged for his church he unwittingly makes a tirelessly indefatigable foe.

Director Paul Thomas Anderson never shifts Day-Lewis from centre stage, the seasoned player darkening every single frame with his brooding misanthropy.

"I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people. I've built up my hatreds over the years little by little," Plainview confides in a rare moment of enlightenment.

With Day-Lewis's powerhouse performance dominating, there's very little room for anyone else to thrive.

However, Dano is piously effective as the evangelical preacher, particularly in one gruelling scene where Plainview is forced to atone for his sins in front of a gawping congregation (the trade-off is that he strikes a deal with a principled church-goer).

Anderson is also strong on the moral uncertainty of the time (the early 1900s) and the cheap price placed on human life with safety pushed well down the the list of priorities by the all-consuming greenback.

It's only in the final straight where his firm grip of the narrative falters and the carefully constructed substance of the grasping fiend falls away.

However, nothing can detract from what has gone before and as a study of undiluted evil it's pretty much the devil of a good job.

Spill blood to see it.

Tim Evans