The film is actually a Stateside murder mystery, and it’s a beautifully executed one: tense, and meditative (at times a little too meditative), with most of the bogus genre conventions scraped away. I’m one of those people who couldn’t abide Crash, with its phony checkerboard structure and glib talky quality-network-drama racial dialectics, but Haggis, teaming up with the great emotional minimalist Tommy Lee Jones, has turned over an austere and authentic new leaf. He has found the terse poetry of the everyday.

Jones’ Hank Deerfield is a retired Army sergeant and Vietnam veteran who hauls gravel for a living. He’s sitting in his Tennessee home when he learns that his son, Mike (Jonathan Tucker), who is scheduled to be returning from a tour of duty in Iraq, has gone missing. With barely a word to his wife (Susan Sarandon), Hank drives to Fort Rudd in New Mexico, where he meets his son’s platoon buddies, all of whom have come home safely. None of them really want to answer his questions, and neither do the officers, but Hank soon learns the bitter truth, when the charred pieces of his son’s body are found by a desert road near the base.

The Army investigators want the incident swept under the rug, and the local cops — there’s a question, based on where the murder took place, of which party has jurisdiction — are just apathetic. Except, that is, for Det. Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), a sympathetic desk jockey Hank cajoles into helping him pursue the case. Hank manages to swipe his son’s camera phone from his quarters and bring it to a local street hacker, who decodes the files and sends them along, one by one. As Hank watches the jerky, staticky replays of Mike’s missions in Iraq, the videos are like something out of Blow-Up — we scan every last inch of those digital ”bricks” to learn the truth of what went on, and how, if at all, it might explain his murder. Hank’s amateur sleuthing, driven by a father’s sorrow and rage, has an arresting low-key gravitas.

In the Valley of Elah is based on the case of Specialist Richard R. Davis, who, after returning from Iraq, was found dead of multiple stab wounds four summers ago. In the film, all the clues that Hank uncovers — a midnight meal at the local chicken joint, the possible involvement of drugs — carry the fascinating banal sting of true crime. The film was shot by the great cinematographer Roger Deakins, and he gives it a high-bureaucratic ’70s classicism — the grip of stately fluorescence. The power of In the Valley of Elah is that Hank, in trying to learn how Mike was killed, is really delving, step by step, into the reality of the Iraq battle zone he came from. The roadside bombs, in their relentless anonymity; the orders to regard every civilian, even children, as a potential threat: How, exactly, does all of this shatter the nerves, and maybe shred the souls, of the men who are there? That’s what drives the movie — the slow, accumulating revelation of how the war in Iraq, in its unique physical and moral circumstances (which can’t be divided), has molded the soldiers fighting it.

Tommy Lee Jones, even when he was a young actor, always had a tense face, with its creased forehead and wounded, accusatory eyes. The creases are deeper now, and so, in this role, are the wounds, but Jones, in a powerful performance, somehow holds every emotion in and shows it to you anyway. Hank’s tightly etched control — the demeanor of a lifelong military man — serves the movie’s ideological purpose: It puts us on the side of a patriot who is not in any way questioning ”the troops” — who, in fact, wouldn’t have it in him to do so. He does ask this, though: What is what we’re doing in Iraq doing to us? The title refers to the setting of the David and Goliath story, with America, in Haggis’ metaphorical scheme, cast as the giant caught off guard. That’s a profoundly unsettling idea, but In the Valley of Elah also uses the American flag to bring you to tears. It’s the first Hollywood Iraq movie to remind me of a Vietnam film like Coming Home, and it does more than disturb. It scalds, moves, and heals. A

But while that chilly sensation is a sign of terror, it may equally be a symptom of delight. The specter of Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a deadpan sociopath with a funny haircut, will feed many a nightmare, but the most lasting impression left by this film is likely to be the deep satisfaction that comes from witnessing the nearly perfect execution of a difficult task. “No Country for Old Men” is purgatory for the squeamish and the easily spooked. For formalists — those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design — it’s pure heaven.

So before I go any further, allow me my moment of bliss at the sheer brilliance of the Coens’ technique. And it is mostly theirs. The editor, Roderick Jaynes, is their longstanding pseudonym. The cinematographer, Roger Deakins, and the composer, Carter Burwell, are collaborators of such long standing that they surely count as part of the nonbiological Coen fraternity. At their best, and for that matter at their less than best, Joel and Ethan Coen, who share writing and directing credit here, combine virtuosic dexterity with mischievous high spirits, as if they were playing Franz Liszt’s most treacherous compositions on dueling banjos. Sometimes their appetite for pastiche overwhelms their more sober storytelling instincts, so it is something of a relief to find nothing especially showy or gimmicky in “No Country.” In the Coen canon it belongs with “Blood Simple,” “Miller’s Crossing” and “Fargo” as a densely woven crime story made more effective by a certain controlled stylistic perversity.

The script follows Mr. McCarthy’s novel almost scene for scene, and what the camera discloses is pretty much what the book describes: a parched, empty landscape; pickup trucks and taciturn men; and lots of killing. But the pacing, the mood and the attention to detail are breathtaking, sometimes literally.

In one scene a man sits in a dark hotel room as his pursuer walks down the corridor outside. You hear the creak of floorboards and the beeping of a transponder, and see the shadows of the hunter’s feet in the sliver of light under the door. The footsteps move away, and the next sound is the faint squeak of the light bulb in the hall being unscrewed. The silence and the slowness awaken your senses and quiet your breathing, as by the simplest cinematic means — Look! Listen! Hush! — your attention is completely and ecstatically absorbed. You won’t believe what happens next, even though you know it’s coming.

By the time this moment arrives, though, you have already been pulled into a seamlessly imagined and self-sufficient reality. The Coens have always used familiar elements of American pop culture and features of particular American landscapes to create elaborate and hermetic worlds. Mr. McCarthy, especially in the western phase of his career, has frequently done the same. The surprise of “No Country for Old Men,” the first literary adaptation these filmmakers have attempted, is how well matched their methods turn out to be with the novelist’s.

Mr. McCarthy’s book, for all its usual high-literary trappings (many philosophical digressions, no quotation marks), is one of his pulpier efforts, as well as one of his funniest. The Coens, seizing on the novel’s genre elements, lower the metaphysical temperature and amplify the material’s dark, rueful humor. It helps that the three lead actors — Tommy Lee Jones and Josh Brolin along with Mr. Bardem — are adept at displaying their natural wit even when their characters find themselves in serious trouble.

The three are locked in a swerving, round-robin chase that takes them through the empty ranges and lonely motels of the West Texas border country in 1980. The three men occupy the screen one at a time, almost never appearing in the frame together, even as their fates become ever more intimately entwined.

Mr. Jones plays Ed Tom Bell, a world weary third-generation sheriff whose stoicism can barely mask his dismay at the tide of evil seeping into the world. Whether Chigurh is a magnetic force moving that tide or just a particularly nasty specimen carried in on it is one of the questions the film occasionally poses. The man who knows him best, a dandyish bounty-hunter played by Woody Harrelson, describes Chigurh as lacking a sense of humor. But the smile that rides up one side of Chigurh’s mouth as he speaks suggests a diabolical kind of mirth — just as the haircut suggests a lost Beatle from hell — and his conversation has a teasing, riddling quality. The punch line comes when he blows a hole in your head with the pneumatic device he prefers to a conventional firearm.

And the butt of his longest joke is Llewelyn Moss (Mr. Brolin), a welder who lives in a trailer with his wife, Carla Jean (Kelly MacDonald) and is dumb enough to think he’s smart enough to get away with taking the $2 million he finds at the scene of a drug deal gone bad. Chigurh is charged with recovering the cash (by whom is neither clear nor especially relevant), and poor Sheriff Bell trails behind, surveying scenes of mayhem and trying to figure out where the next one will be.

Taken together, these three hombres are not quite the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but each man does carry some allegorical baggage. Mr. Jones’s craggy, vinegary warmth is well suited to the kind of righteous, decent lawman he has lately taken to portraying. Ed Tom Bell is almost continuous with the retired M.P. Mr. Jones played in Paul Haggis’s “In the Valley of Elah.” It is hard to do wisdom without pomposity, or probity without preening, but Mr. Jones manages with an aplomb that is downright thrilling.

Still, if “No Country for Old Men” were a simple face-off between the sheriff’s goodness and Chigurh’s undiluted evil, it would be a far stiffer, less entertaining picture. Llewelyn is the wild card — a good old boy who lives on the borderline between good luck and bad, between outlaw and solid citizen — and Mr. Brolin is the human center of the movie, the guy you root for and identify with even as the odds against him grow steeper by the minute.

And the minutes fly by, leaving behind some unsettling notions about the bloody, absurd intransigence of fate and the noble futility of human efforts to master it. Mostly, though, “No Country for Old Men” leaves behind the jangled, stunned sensation of having witnessed a ruthless application of craft.

“No Country for Old Men” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). A lot of killing.