Aside from exceptional talent and triple-decker names, Day-Lewis and Anderson share a ferocity of approach to their work, investing so much intensity in the projects they choose that they don’t choose very many: “Blood” is the actor’s fourth film in the last decade and the director’s second in the last eight years.

Anderson, a modern cinematic visionary, is always happiest when he is out on the aesthetic edge, determined to involve audiences in disturbing, difficult narratives, from the suburban pornographers of “Boogie Nights” to “Magnolia’s” raining frogs.

As for Day-Lewis, he has become justifiably celebrated for disappearing into his characters with a completeness that is both terrifying and an ideal match for Anderson’s filmmaking approach. “People don’t know how Daniel can do this job the way that he does it,” the director has tellingly said, “and my feeling is, I just can’t understand how anyone could do it any other way.”

The story that has intrigued these two men started with a venerable source, Upton Sinclair’s muckraking 1927 novel “Oil!” The book, however, has a really minimal, almost “suggested by” relationship to what’s on the screen, which turns out to be a distinctly timely and modern tale, albeit one with problematic aspects, that involves the unholy trinity of oil, money and religion.

For Anderson, who has reveled in multi-strand stories, this has been a chance to venture into, in his own words, “100% straightforward old-fashioned storytelling.” With this filmmaker, however, nothing is ever really old-fashioned or straightforward, and there is enough savagery, extremism and grotesque violence in the way “Blood” unfolds to unsettle most folk.

Making “Blood’s” story even more disturbing is the troubling score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, powerful, brooding new music that is critical to the film’s impact, creating pervasive uneasiness and letting us know that, appearances to the contrary, we’re not watching a conventional story.

It helps, of course, to have someone of Day-Lewis’ trademark fierceness and implacability as protagonist Daniel Plainview, whom we follow from his turn-of-the-20th-century beginnings as a silver miner to a finale nearly 30 years later.

Day-Lewis works at such a high-wire level that many of the film’s supporting cast members simply fade away. Only the self-possessed newcomer Dillon Freasier as his young son H.W. and the gifted Paul Dano of “Little Miss Sunshine” as his nemesis have the ability to hold the screen against him.

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