One of the first lessons you’ll learn in life drawing concerns the magic of lost lines. An object’s true appearance is often defined by the spaces around it, and those indistinct areas where intensity of light or shadow obscure the hard edges in between. “No Country for Old Men” is like that. Leaving it up to the perceiver’s brain to fill in the blanks, the lost lines technique is, in many art forms (including music), an elemental device for engaging the viewer’s mind. The application of this technique to modern cinematic storytelling is a risky one, buying filmmakers a one-way ticket either to being qualified as an Oscar winner (Martin Scorsese) or a flaming crackpot (Richard Kelly). Or, when done really well, both (hello, David Lynch).

The writing/producing/directing/editing team of brothers Joel and Ethan Coen have made a successful, if varyingly reviewed, career for themselves, creating projects pretty much exactly as they want. Each of their movies bears their distinct mark, yet each is unique. Many of their movies appear as meditations on specific genres from film history, and they’ve shown considerable range. They’ve tackled, in various combination, crime, slapstick, noir, mythical epic, 1940s fast talk romance, private eye whodunit, courtroom drama and even remakes (how sad is it, by the way, that we should probably start calling “remakes” a genre). Watching a marathon of Coen pictures is like taking a class in film history, style and technique.

Before “No Country,” one thing the brothers had never tried, however, was adaptation. Previously always working from their own stories and scripts, this marks their first attempt to reinterpret someone else’s vision. Something about Cormac McCarthy’s bleak 2005 treatise on violence, uncertainty, inevitability, wisdom, stupidity and death in Texas obviously called to them, and they stepped right up to answer. In their remarkable fidelity to the written form, they’ve made themselves to McCarthy what Peter Jackson was to Tolkien. They set aside their characteristic tricks, took out their grownup tools and put all their experience to the service of the original book’s spirit—right down to its distinctly uncinematic core of despair, ambiguity and confusion. Consequences in this world may or may not have anything to do with one’s actions, and, as one character points out, “No one knows what’s coming.” Another character literally flips a coin to see what’ll happen next. As in life, The Coens show that the journey from point A to point B is rarely made explicit, and it’s up to individuals to extrapolate whatever meaning they can from their experiences.

Within all the lost lines, the Coens lead us to perceive some very tight, complicated relationships between the three principle characters. Even though they barely meet each other, all three are haunted hunters on twisting trails. The first is a luckless redneck (Josh Brolin, established as an everyday lay-about and poor decision maker by drinking cheap beer from a can), who salvages a case of money from the scene of a desert drug deal gone haywire. The second is a creaky small-town sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones, subtly identified as the good guy by drinking milk from a glass), vexed by a hard-won wisdom that wisdom does no favors. And the third is a stone cold killing machine hired to recover the money (Javier Bardem). You know he’s the bad guy because he drinks other people’s milk straight from the bottle. Oh, and he brutally murders anyone who lays eyes on him. When asked by an innocent bystander at one point “Are you going to kill me?” he responds simply “Do you see me?” It seems pretty certain that when he’s not onscreen killing people, he’s just off screen killing people. Although he bears some comparison to Hannibal Lector, the Terminator, and, interestingly enough, the Mike Meyers from both “Halloween” and “Austin Powers” (get a load of that way-out haircut), he nearly eclipses any movie villain we’ve ever seen. A sallow-eyed flow of molten lead, he’s the embodiment of inevitable entropy, the Sun going out, the inescapable end of all things. Even as such, as the story unfolds, we see that his heartless philosophy provides no shelter from the capricious, unpredictable whims of the universe.

The Coens’ talent for grounding this level of existentialist angst into characters of such believability and landscapes rich with texture and color has never been put to better use. It takes a particular courage of vision to challenge an audience with a film that tells half its story off screen and between the lines, but here, they’ve simply outdone themselves. It may be bad luck to label any work by a living artist a masterpiece. But if this isn’t it, to paraphrase the sheriff, it’ll do till the masterpiece shows up.