Blood Simple (1984)

We are ending the Coen run where it started, on the Friday before Halloween, because this is the closest thing to a horror film they ever made. It was shot for very little money that they raised themselves, going door to door with a two minute reel. Everything they spent the next forty years doing is already here in the first film, fully formed. The dark comedy, the fatal misunderstanding, the violence that is clumsy rather than cool, the sense that the universe is indifferent and slightly amused.

The engine is beautifully simple. Every character acts on a piece of information that is wrong, and the film never lets any of them correct it. Abby thinks she knows who she is afraid of. Ray thinks he knows what he is cleaning up. Marty thinks he has bought something. Not one person in this movie ever learns the truth, including the person who survives it. The audience is the only one who ever sees the whole picture, and that is where the dread comes from.

It is also the debut of Frances McDormand, who bookends this run, since we opened with Fargo. Watching Abby here and Marge there is watching the same actor play both ends of the Coens' world, the woman things happen to and the woman who understands everything. And M. Emmet Walsh's sweating, chuckling private detective is one of the great screen villains, an unbothered man in a yellow suit who finds all of this quite funny.

The title comes from Dashiell Hammett. In Red Harvest, going blood simple is what happens to a person after violence, when the fear scrambles their thinking and they stop being able to reason. That is a precise description of the plot. Everyone in this film is making decisions in a state where they can no longer think clearly, which is why they keep making it worse.

Notice how badly everyone does everything. Nobody is a professional. The killing is botched, the cleanup is botched, the body will not cooperate, the gun is in the wrong place. The Coens spent their whole career refusing to make crime look competent, and it starts here, in the first twenty minutes.

The film is genuinely funny in places and people are sometimes surprised at themselves for laughing. The fish on the desk, the newspaper, the incinerator. The comedy is not there to break tension, it is there because the Coens think a universe this arbitrary is funny. That combination is their entire signature and it was there from the start.

Then there is the last line. Abby says a name, believing she knows who is on the other side of the wall, and she is wrong, and the man laughs at the joke she cannot hear. She survives without ever understanding a single thing that happened to her, and the film finds that both terrifying and hilarious.