MANILA, Philippines?After Joel and Ethan Coen?s ?No Country for Old Men? was voted Best Picture in the 2007 Oscars last week, we made it a point to preview it, to determine what made it win. The Coen brothers? award-winning film turns out to be a really scary tale that pits a number of harrowingly compelling and determined characters against each other?to the death!

In-your-face action

The in-your-face action is initiated by Josh Brolin?s character?s discovery of the aftermath of a drugs-related shootout in the desert. He makes off with the payment involved?a cool $2 million that he hopes will put an end to all his problems.

Unfortunately, the cool stash quickly turns hot when some devilishly determined men try to hunt it and its bearer down. Brolin?s arch-nemesis, Anton Chigurh, is played by Javier Bardem, who turns in a truly riveting portrayal that creeps up on you with the stealth and lethal threat of a scorpion?s sting.

Bardem is so scarifyingly effective in the role that his portrayal should end up right up there with Anthony Hopkins? characterization of Hannibal Lecter in ?The Silence of the Lambs.?

Like Hopkins, Bardem plays it evil without acting up a storm. Unlike most ham villains who eat up the scenery and mistake volume for intensity, Hopkins and Bardem know that evil is enhanced when it?s played as sinister as a whisper.

Thus, as Brolin and Bardem?s characters play their cat-and-mouse game all over the map, they lock the viewers into their deadly duel in an especially compelling way.

Even more amazingly, both characters are ?negative? types, and yet, the directors are able to present them in such a detailed way that the viewer ends up caring about what happens to them. ?Not that the viewer approves of their actuations, but the personal bond is definitely established.

Contrastingly, a third key character is portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones, who?s cast as a veteran sheriff whose own personal story is different from the first two, and yet occasionally dovetails into them in perceptively and thematically telling ways.

A fourth character is ?played? by the viewer himself, because he?s subliminally invited by the movie?s ?ordinary? details to emotionally link up with the events onscreen.

The viewer is neither criminal now lawman, yet he too experiences bursts of hope and despair, of desperation and survival, so he ends up understanding what drives these movie protagonists and antagonists, prompting them to cheat death in order to ?claim? their lives.

Cumulative nod

We figure that it?s this subliminal juxtaposition of the ordinary with the bizarre, so difficult to achieve, that impressed Academy voters to give this film their cumulative nod.

Also very dodgy to pull off is this movie?s sustained shiver of fear, as though it is the viewer?s own life that is at risk. It?s all storytelling and narrative illusion, of course, but it?s made so real that it invests the moviegoing experience with genuine, doomsday dread.