Think of “Psycho” or any other film about dissociative identity disorder.
According to a 2014 report from Science News, however, one movie murderer can be described as wholly psychologically accurate: Anton Chigurh from the Coen Brothers’ 2007 Best Picture winner “No Country from Old Men.” Anton Chigurh, played by the Oscar-winning Javier Bardem, is an assassin who murders his victims using a device called a captive bullet pistol (a widget that fires a bolt into a victim’s brain via air pressure, then retracts it back again). They’re typically used to slaughter cattle. Anton isn’t just an assassin, though; he’s a soft-spoken, intense monster who seemed wholly detached from the world around him. And he never laughs wildly. Indeed, when he smiles, it seems false and manipulative. Anton doesn’t really know what human emotions are. That’s a more accurate portrayal of a psychopath.
This was the conclusion reached by forensic psychologist Samuel Leistedt and his colleague Paul Linkowski at the end of a fun, three-year project. The pair watched 400 movies, each one with a purported psychopath, to see which films best represent psychopathy as an illness. Anton Chigurh was, by their study, the most accurate portrayal.
