In ‘Destiny,’ a short story by Ethan Coen, a private eye scrupulously details the sound as a hollow metal tube strikes the back of his head. Coen Brothers films often contain things you don’t normally see: a heavily-pregnant police officer bending in the snow (Fargo), a pitched coffee cup bouncing off someone’s head (The Big Lebowski), a girl fastened to her mother with a piece of string (O Brother, Where Art Thou?) or a hand pinned to the windowsill of an adjoining room with a knife (Blood Simple). No Country contains numerous such moments, chief among them a dead dog with bullet-holes in its coat, a pit bull pursuing a man along a fast-flowing river, and door-locks being knocked clean out of their doorframes with a bolt gun.

Even the dialogue, inherited from the novel by Cormac McCarthy, is not standard: ‘You ain’t heard from him?’ ‘Not word one.’ A cinematic nod to Psycho, as Woody Harrelson’s private investigator mounts the stairs, suggests we might anticipate a plot-turn which left the audience among whom I watched the film audibly dumbfounded. Yet this is not so much an action movie as a ‘what-happens after the action?’ movie. The film opens and closes with Tommy Lee Jones’ meditation on sheriffs and men of the past, events and the times having outpaced him. ‘You can’t stop what’s comin. Ain’t all waitin’ on you … That’s vanity,’ he is informed by an ex-policeman disabled in the line of duty.

This film offers a world as polarised as the celebrated Fargo, whose pregnant police officer Marge Gunderson cannot comprehend the motives of the evil-doers she apprehends. In this film, minor characters display a comic ignorance of the gravity of the situation: ‘Shouldn’t be doin’ that. Even a young man like you … Hitchhikin,’’ Moss is warned. ‘You don’t understand,’ he is later told by a private investigator who is also found to be out of his depth.

With its surety of tone, constant shocks and invention, this takes its place, for me, alongside Fargo and The Big Lebowski among the triptych of the brothers’ greatest work.