An animal roams post-war America. This is not a metaphor. Freddie Quell, the naval veteran carved into the feverish, contorted body of Joaquin Phoenix, is a force of nature, a bundle of primary instincts that civilization tried to domesticate with a uniform and a war, and failed miserably. We first see him on a Pacific beach, sculpting an opulent sand-woman and then miming a clumsy, desperate coupling with it. He is a Golem of libido and trauma, a Caliban emerged from the brackish depths of the Twentieth Century, distilling literal and metaphorical poisons for anyone careless enough to drink from his well. Freddie is the Freudian Id in clogs and bell-bottoms, a broken piece of that "Greatest Generation" which official historiography has painted as monolithic and victorious, but whose most violent and repressed aftershocks Paul Thomas Anderson records with the precision of a seismograph.

Then, from the sea, his dialectical opposite emerges. Lancaster Dodd (a Philip Seymour Hoffman who is overflowing, Homeric, an Orson Welles who has swallowed L. Ron Hubbard) is intellect, structure, narrative. He is the charismatic, thundering Super-Ego, the guru, the "Master" at the head of a para-religious-psychological movement called "the Cause." The encounter between the two, on a yacht that cleaves the waves like a promise of salvation, is not a simple narrative juncture; it is the cosmic collision of two fundamental principles. It is formless matter meeting the potter's hand, chaos yearning for order, the animal in search of a master. Anderson is not filming a story, but the electroshock of a national soul, a psychological duel that takes on the contours of a dark and perverse American founding myth.

Anderson's filmography is a constant exploration of the dysfunctional, surrogate, and desperately sought-after family. From Boogie Nights to There Will Be Blood, his characters are orphans in search of fathers, and The Master is perhaps the archetypal culmination of this quest. The relationship between Dodd and Quell transcends the master-disciple dynamic. It is a father-son relationship, with all the attendant charge of love, resentment, and violence. It is an infinite psychoanalytic session, a mutual dependence, a taut and unconsummated homoerotic bond that vibrates beneath the surface of every scene. They seek, find, study, wound, and complete one another. Dodd sees in Freddie the primordial man, the beast his theories claim to be able to tame, the ultimate test for his doctrine. Freddie, in turn, finds in Dodd the only human being capable of looking him straight in the eye without flinching, of giving him a name, a structure, a "processing" that might, perhaps, sublimate his incomprehensible pain.

The first "processing" sequence is one of the absolute peaks of twenty-first-century cinema. Shot with fixed, unrelenting frames, it is a Kammerspiel that lays bare two actors at the height of their powers. Mihai Mălaimare Jr.'s camera (in his first, dazzling collaboration with Anderson) does not judge, does not comment: it records. It records the sweat, Phoenix's nervous tic, Hoffman's apparent calm and intellectual hunger. It is a verbal duel that becomes physical, a secular exorcism in which Dodd's questions seek not answers, but the other's total surrender. This is cinema that recalls the psychological ferocity of a Bergman meeting the raw physicality of a Cassavetes, where the word becomes a scalpel slicing into the soul.

But Anderson, the omnivorous and brilliant cinephile that he is, is not content with chamber drama. He shoots in 70mm, an epic, colossal format, to tell an intimate and claustrophobic story. This choice is not an aesthetic whim, but a declaration of intent. The thick grain, the almost tactile depth of field, and the chromatic richness grant this internal drama a mythological dimension. The ocean waves, the Arizona deserts, the bourgeois parlors of the East Coast become the monumental stage for one soul's struggle. It is as if John Ford had decided to film a script by Harold Pinter, or as if David Lean had become obsessed with a character from a John Steinbeck novel. Freddie Quell, with his lopsided gait and perennial grunt, could be a close relative of Lennie Small from Of Mice and Men, another creature too large and instinctual for a world that demands control and conformity.

The context is, of course, fundamental. The America of the 1950s is not just the setting, but an invisible character. It is a country that emerged victorious from the war but is inwardly broken, in the grip of a collective anxiety, desperately searching for new prophets and new faiths. Dodd's Cause, with its syncretism of psychoanalysis, reincarnation, and positive thinking, is the perfect answer to this void. Although the parallel with Scientology and the figure of L. Ron Hubbard is evident and intentional (Anderson himself admitted to reading a great deal on the subject), the film is too intelligent and universal to be a simple exposé. The Cause is a MacGuffin, a pretext for exploring the eternal and desperate human need for a narrative. For a "master." In a meaningless world, Dodd offers a cosmology, however bizarre and improvised. He offers the promise that the past can be "cleared," that we are not just "animals."

The score by Jonny Greenwood, by now a symbiotic collaborator of Anderson's, is the film's nervous system. Dissonant, atonal, percussive, yet capable of opening up into moments of unexpected and heart-wrenching melody, the music does not accompany the images: it excavates them from within. It is the white noise of Freddie's trauma, the hum of his restless mind, which at times subsides into the seductive harmony of the songs sung by Dodd, like the hypnotic "Slow Boat to China." The music, like the film itself, works on the unresolved tension between chaos and control.

What elevates The Master to the rank of immortal masterpiece is its courageous, almost provocative ambiguity. Anderson offers no answers. Is Dodd a charlatan or a sincere believer? Probably both. Is Freddie saved or further damaged by the Cause? The answer does not exist. The film closes with an almost mocking circularity. Dodd's last, prophetic line to Freddie – "If you find a way to live without a master, any master, be sure to let the rest of us know, for you would be the first person in the history of the world" – is the epistemological keystone of the entire work. Freddie's quest is not exceptional; it is universal. We are all, to some extent, searching for a system to give meaning to our inner chaos, be it a religion, a political ideology, a football team, or a film critic.

In the end, we see Freddie repeating the processing questions to a new woman, lying beside her on the sand, just as in the beginning. Perhaps he has found a semblance of peace, or perhaps he has simply learned to be his own master, internalizing the ghost of his mentor-tormentor. Or perhaps, more simply, he is condemned to repeat his cycle, like a wandering planet in search of an orbit. The Master is not a film to be "understood"; it is an experience to be absorbed. It is a telluric, visceral work, a Francis Bacon painting animated by the grace of Terrence Malick, a symphonic poem about the unquenchable thirst for faith and belonging in the wounded heart of the American empire. A film that does not end with the credits, but continues to ask its uncomfortable and necessary questions long after the house lights have come up.