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Rating: Has it ever happened to you one fine day to be particularly naughty with a really bad action, like, seducing and abandoning your best friend's sister, spitting in subway cars, slipping a CD under your jacket in a record store, or robbing the post office? And perhaps that same night you dreamed of trying to escape from something unknown but couldn't, in fact, you already know it's all useless, yet you run away anyway. It's your conscience.
That's what happens to Llewelyn Moss, a young Vietnam veteran who is hunting antelopes on the Rio Grande and stumbles upon a chilling scene. A couple of pick-ups stopped in the valley, the bodies of a shootout between drug traffickers on the ground, a dying man asking for water, and a briefcase with two and a half million dollars.
If you're one of those who struggles to make ends meet, what would you do? At that moment begins Moss's dream as, having returned home with the loot, he wakes up at night to foolishly return to that place of death to bring a can of water to someone who is already a corpse. Why does he do it? Because he knows he was wrong to take that money, and he wants to be punished. The punishment has all the connotations of something unreal, moves like a puppet, has the hair of a doll, and those few times it hints at a smile it's a grimace pulled with strings, it kills silently with a piston operated by a compressed air cylinder and has a strange name for a hitman: Chirurgh.
The script of the dream contemplates escape, even if useless, and Llewelyn goes for it, just like that antelope framed for a moment in the sight of his rifle at the beginning of the film. There is someone who could/should help him, just like a priest does, someone capable of making him face his conscience, and that's Sheriff Bell. He is a straight-as-an-arrow man, the descendant of that glorious lineage of lawmen who, since the time of the Wild West, have been accustomed to expecting a bullet from a cattle thief at any moment of their short existence. But today's sheriff is inadequate for that mission, he no longer has the strength or the enthusiasm to save the mischievous sheep who stray only to end up in the wolf's jaws, or maybe it isn't right for that sheep to be saved today? Moss is a man who had the chance to choose, to protect himself and his family from something evil but didn't. At that moment, his fate was sealed, and the angel of Death will come to claim his body without giving him the chance to play it at heads or tails, just like it is granted to that shopkeeper who, since birth, like all of us, is gambling with their life every day without even knowing it.
Llewelyn, like in the best nightmares, will never see this ghost, hears steps behind a door, the shadow that shifts in a shootout, the voice from a phone saying: "You know how this story is going to end, right? You bring me the money, and I leave your wife alone. These are the best conditions you can get. I'm not saying you'll save yourself, because you can't save yourself".
Sheriff Bell realizes that he is (like all priests) just an impotent spectator of the perennial affair between a man and his conscience and when he will recognize Moss on the table of the morgue, to the words of the other sheriff: "You couldn't have done anything to prevent it", he will reply bitterly: "I know, but one always prefers to think otherwise".
Moss's dreamlike escape ends here, with Bell retiring and himself recalling having dreamed of his father giving him money but him losing it and another dream in which the parent was lighting the way with a torch to cross the mountains at night. But today it is no longer possible to separate light from shadow, good from evil. The image of Chirurgh reflected on the screen of the switched-off television in Moss's abandoned trailer is replaced a few hours later by that of Sheriff Bell. Two sides of the same coin, the one that is flipped to decide fate.
A chillingly perfect film, without a soundtrack. Because dreams have no soundtrack.
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