"Crime western noir horror comedy"
—Critic Rob Mackie of The Guardian on the many genres he believes are reflected in the film.[79]
Although Paul Arendt of the BBC finds that "No Country ... can be enjoyed as a straightforward genre thriller" with "suspense sequences ... that rival the best of Hitchcock",[77] in other respects the film can be described as a western, and the question remains unsettled. For Richard Gillmore, it "is, and is not, a western. It takes place in the West and its main protagonists are what you might call westerners. On the other hand, the plot revolves around a drug deal that has gone bad; it involves four-wheel-drive vehicles, semiautomatic weapons, and executives in high-rise buildings, none of which would seem to belong in a western."[33]
William J. Devlin finesses the point, calling the film a "neo-western", distinguishing it from the classic western by the way it "demonstrates a decline, or decay, of the traditional western ideal ... The moral framework of the West ... that contained ... innocent and wholesome heroes who fought for what is right, is fading. The villains, or the criminals, act in such a way that the traditional hero cannot make sense of their criminal behavior."[80]
Deborah Biancott sees a "western gothic ..., a struggle for and with God, an examination of a humanity haunted by its past and condemned to the horrors of its future. ... [I]t's a tale of unrepentant evil, the frightening but compelling bad guy who lives by a moral code that is unrecognizable and alien. The wanderer, the psychopath, Anton Chigurh, is a man who's supernaturally invincible."[81]
Even the directors have weighed in. Joel Coen found the film "interesting in a genre way; but it was also interesting to us because it subverts the genre expectations."[82] He did not consider the film a western because "when we think about westerns we think about horses and six-guns, saloons and hitching posts." But co-director Ethan said that the film "is sort of a western," before adding "and sort of not."[83]
Gillmore, though, thinks that it is "a mixing of the two great American movie genres, the western and film noir," which "reflect the two sides of the American psyche. On the one hand, there is a western in which the westerner is faced with overwhelming odds, but between his perseverance and his skill, he overcomes the odds and triumphs. ... In film noir, on the other hand, the hero is smart (more or less) and wily and there are many obstacles to overcome, the odds are against him, and, in fact, he fails to overcome them. ... This genre reflects the pessimism and fatalism of the American psyche. With No Country for Old Men, the Coens combine these two genres into one movie. It is a western with a tragic, existential, film noir ending."[33]
