No country for old men

In what ways does the opening to “No country for Old men” conform to the conventions of a thriller film?

We discover that by seeing the opening to “No country for old men” that this film is a creepy thriller film. It shows the location where the film is set by using a wide angle shot to show the desolate landscape, and how dry and baron it really is, this means the characters are isolated from a society/community.

The opening of this film begins with silence to build up suspense leaving the audience wondering what will happen next. The first two characters we see are the police men and what seems to be a normal guy driving a car who has been stopped by a police officer. The police officer takes the guy in with a tank of oxygen the guy had with him, the oxygen tank might have been show because it may be used later on in the film. Whilst the officer is on the phone the guy who has been cuffed sneaks up behind him and using the hand cuffs he strangles him, they both drop to the floor and finally the officer dies after his neck had been cut by the cuffs, this scene is about how the officer was caught unawares a convention with a thriller film. The psycho then releases himself and taking his oxygen tank with him he takes the officers car and becomes a cop pulling a member of public in. The psycho then gets out with the oxygen tank and walks to the car he has just pulled in which is highly deceptive because the member of the public believes he is an officer of the law, but then the psycho kills him by putting a tube to his head which is connected to the tank which blasts pressurized air through his head, making him drop to the ground.

This person, like the officer was caught unawares and then has been killed a few moments later. The next scene is a hunter, hunting antelope, there is a wide angled shot again showing the desolate location again. Between this scene and the one before they both have a theme of hunting, using weapons to kill, and catching people and animals unaware, they don’t know what will happen next. In this scene the hunter shoots one of the antelope but it doesn’t kill it straight away, he follows it. There is a wide shot of the hunter walking towards the camera with a background with hills and the sky is grey which means that something he may come upon is going to be possibly shocking, through the weather this builds to the scene which reveals what exactly the hunter has found. Using the weather to build suspense is another convention of what a thriller film could include.