Plainview: The name could belong to a cookie-cutter 1950s suburb. But Daniel Plainview, the rapacious, calculating wildcatter of Paul Thomas Anderson’s excellent “There Will Be Blood,” which hits New York Theaters on December 26, rises from an earlier, more ruthless stage in American evolution. He is frightening and thrilling, misanthropically driven yet magnetic, and, as acted or, better still, embodied by Daniel Day-Lewis, he is a fully fledged and fleshed human enigma all his own.

Together, Messrs. Anderson and Day-Lewis, two exacting auteurs doing some of their best work to date, have crafted what is at once a mesmerizing, slow-building tragedy and an effortlessly atmospheric and beautiful historical piece, redolent of sunbaked earth, oil spurts, and Plainview’s bristling walrus whiskers. “There Will Be Blood” is the sort of sure-handed, well-composed movie that is rounded out with just the right detail, and you sense you’re in good hands from the first shot.

That opening shot stares at a dusty California hillside at the turn of the 20th century as a hair-raising klaxon-like wail climbs without mercy on the soundtrack (courtesy of Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood). The ensuing subterranean sequence — a grime-mottled Plainview scrabbling deep within a mine shaft for specks of silver— establishes the man as indefatigable and quickly grounds the film with a neat intimation of the elemental. This being, well, pre-OSHA, Plainview slips and breaks his leg in terrible fashion, but, excruciatingly, he hauls himself up the ladder and out to pursue that claim.

The silver claim is merely a prelude to the big game, which also springs from the ground. Before long, Plainview (now with an aggressive limp) is establishing himself as an oilman, accompanied by a boy, H.W. (a precociously thoughtful Dillon Freasier), who has been orphaned and subsequently adopted after an accident at Plainview’s drilling operation. The real lucky strike occurs with the arrival of an unnerving young man, Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), who offers a surefire tip in exchange for cash. Plainview and H.W. head to Sunday’s family farm and, on the wry pretext of a father-son quail hunt, scout the parcel of land for black gold. Plainview leans into swindling Sunday’s father with ease, his pitch measured as always, but Paul’s brother, Eli (Mr. Dano again), an aspiring evangelist, is shrewd enough to see the potential of the burgeoning oil bonanza for funding and founding a church. Eli’s grip on Plainview’s coattails sets the stage for a twinned conflict between the homegrown American talents for entrepreneurship and religious fervor, but still in terms of the oil raider’s fierce drive for control (“Why don’t I own that?” might be Plainview’s own prayer). Amused at first, Plainview pays lip service, but Eli’s influence, itself deployed with self-interest, maneuvers his fellow opportunist into submitting to a fire-and-brimstone public baptism.

The mind-blowing scene of Plainview’s humiliation on his knees features Mr. Day-Lewis in some of the most wrenching, warring facial contortions in a closeup since Lon Chaney in “The Unknown.” But the extraordinary actor’s fine-grained creation can be appreciated in even the least dramatic moments: Plainview’s mellifluously growly voice alone outclasses entire performances by other actors. “Craft” has been a public relations cliché for so long, but Mr. Day-Lewis is nothing if not a craftsman; the infrequency of his essays on screen (six in the last 15 years) is no affectation but a sign of the care and the risks he takes without ever losing focus. (Plainview also marks a remarkable reversal from his last role, as an aging hippie in “The Ballad of Jack and Rose.”)

Mr. Anderson, whose last feature film was 2002’s “Punch-Drunk Love,” carries his own reputation for artistic engineering, but even his best work has felt stylized, shooting for a rhapsody of reborn movie love and of ordinary lives exalted through glorious mise-en-scène and camerawork. “There Will Be Blood” works in a more nuts-and-bolts mode, still building tensions, grand moments, and climaxes but grounded in (and by) Mr. Day-Lewis rather than ennobling an Adam Sandler or a Tom Cruise.

Rather than leading to worked-over embellishment, the realist period setting (an earlier California than Mr. Anderson’s usual milieu) seems to relax and refine the filmmaker’s touch and sense of tone. Plainview’s eventual treatment of H.W., despite an affection manifest in inculcating business smarts and creating a kind of Mini-Me silent partner, follows through on the logic of a man whose pride may lead him to pick a fight over his son with potential investors but will not let him stray from a Darwinian bottom-line, embracing isolation.

Confidently composed with a steady, measured momentum and a smooth bridging of time periods, the two-and-a-half-hour movie avoids the sense of hollowness and foregone conclusion that afflict “great man” stories (even jazzed-up fare like “The Aviator”). “There Will Be Blood” is a partial adaptation of the equally hefty 1927 novel “Oil!,” by the socialist author Upton Sinclair (Mr. Anderson has said he picked up where Sinclair left off), who had the venal climate of the Harding administration in mind, but Plainview stands on his own two feet, the sort of figure who’d be rendered in a yellow-journalism comic bestriding a map of the country (or hewn into a rock face).

Definitely not just a two-man show, “There Will Be Blood” would be nothing without the elementally attuned, never flashy cinematography of Mr. Anderson’s frequent partner Robert Elswit, and Mr. Greenwood’s primitivist-modernist gouges, rumbles, and runs up scales (evoking Stanley Kubrick’s use of Ligeti in “2001” and Penderecki in “The Shining”). Likewise, Ciarán Hinds, as Plainview’s right-hand man, efficiently folds himself into a small but illustrative role. Mr. Dano, on the other hand, suffers from proximity to Mr. Day-Lewis, and looks comparatively anachronistic in his brooding tics and spastic tricks (many reprised from his role as an evangelical teenager in “The King”). Combined with a piously pleading expression, his big head and narrow eyes make him look as if his brain is slowly expanding.

It’s a testament to the filmmaking that what sounds like a predictable premise is brought off with such rewarding results. Much about “There Will Be Blood” recalls the satisfaction of ’70s New American Cinema, which has always inspired Mr. Anderson (he even served as backup director for Robert Altman on the latter’s swan song, “A Prairie Home Companion”). Mr. Day-Lewis has mentioned watching footage of director-actor John Huston, whose free-wheelingly vicious Noah Cross from “Chinatown” is an antecedent to Plainview. One can’t help but notice that Mr. Anderson has chosen a novel told from the perspective of a great oilman’s son, and with “There Will Be Blood,” he may finally have come into his oedipal own in terms of ambition and execution.