By Robert Scucci
| Published
If you’re a fan of the humor found in The Big Lebowski and Raising Arizona, but also enjoy the slow, brooding sense of dread that No Country for Old Men has to offer, then you need to take a trip back to 1984 and experience the best of both worlds from the directors that brought you all of the above. That’s right, Blood Simple, the Coen Brothers’ directorial debut, is streaming with all of its violent glory on Max. One thing you’ll notice about Blood Simple, which is also a through line in every other Coen Brothers film, is just how intentional every single frame is, and how even the darkest scenes that shouldn’t make you laugh still happen to have a wicked sense of humor that you can’t help but smirk at.
I Haven’t Done Anything Funny
Blood Simple starts off with a simple act of marital impropriety when Ray (John Getz) engages in an affair with Abby (Frances McDormand), the wife of his boss, Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya). The only way to describe Julian Marty is if slow-burning rage and poor impulse control was a person. Julian quickly finds out about the affair because he paid an investigator named Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) to follow Abby, and now that his suspicions are confirmed, he offers to pay him $10,000 to kill his wife and her lover.
While Blood Simple’s plot sounds pretty straight forward, and in many ways it is, each principal character has a tendency to speak in half truths, which causes a healthy amount of suspicion when Marty’s pay-for-murder plot goes off the rails thanks to Visser’s efforts in deception.
In an ideal world, Julian would “go fishing” for a couple days to establish an alibi while Visser shoots and kills Ray and Abby. From that point, Marty would do some clever bookkeeping to move the $10,000 undetected while Visser disposes of the bodies.
Deliberate Foreshadowing Keeps The Audience One Step Ahead
Thanks to the Coen Brothers’ sense of economy in their writing, and Joel Coen’s directorial instinct, the cinematography in Blood Simple reveals cracks in Marty and Visser’s plan that will stay in the back of your mind before paying off later in the film. Whether it’s a Zippo lighter set on the table, or the amount of bullets loaded into a revolver, there’s always some element of visual storytelling that you know you should keep paying attention to, but for reasons you may not fully understand until they present themselves at the right moment to make it all click.
Having watched Blood Simple for the first time in a very long time, my favorite aspect of the film was how I always felt one step ahead of Ray, Abby, Marty, and Visser. As a viewer, I have access to all of their perspectives, while they’re only seeing their own stories unfold from their own respective vantage points. This may sound like “suspense thriller 101” kind of stuff, but if you’ve watched enough movies in your lifetime, you know full well how easy it is for a filmmaker to screw up these slow-burn shifts in perspective by introducing too many extraneous side plots that never pay off, or, even worse, not fully understanding how to deliver the main story without beating the premise over the viewer’s head.
Streaming Blood Simple On Max
Between Marty’s ever-building rage, Ray and Abby’s fear for their lives and increasing suspicion of each other, and Visser’s charming and sarcastic yet menacing southern drawl, Blood Simple is a powerhouse directorial debut from the Coen Brothers that still holds up over 30 years after its original release because of just how such a simple plot can be built upon to constantly surprise you well into its third act. And it’s evident, even from the beginning of their filmmaking career, that the Coen Brothers know how to write stories that have zero fat in them, as every single frame in Blood Simple is shot with intent.
As of this writing, you can stream Blood Simple on Max.
