Blood Simple. (1984)

Blood Simple is all gore and violence - and somehow it ends up being a mesmerizing and stylistically brilliant film; Ethan&Joel Coen at their best. The film features jealous lovers, revenge and ravenous desire - and somehow all of this appears to be an inevitable series of events, despite the fact that everything goes wrong, in some way or another. If everything did not seem to be bound to happen in what appears to be some hidden necessity this film would be rather nonsensical. The magic of Blood simple is that somehow it ends up in a specific place and all the time you don't even bother to ponder on how it got there, it just did, because it had to.

There's the malevolent owner of a run-down bar who hires a detective to - yeah you know - kill his carefree (but tough) wife and her lover, a bartender. The private eye (M. Emmet Walsh) plays in his own league of sleaze. A grin on his face and a stetson on his head, he's the ultimate hitman. Every second he's onscreen is g-o-l-d. That's not to say that the rest of the characters are fluffy angels. The logic of Blood simple is that in the end EVERYONE must die, or well nearly everybody. The contrivances the Coen brothers use so well is that at no time do I start to doubt the universe into which we are thrown. Somehow, it all makes sense, or should we say, sense is thrown out of the window. Colors and composition are used to build scenes that seem spontaneous and extremely well-planned at the same time. The camera wanders about in the barren Texas locations: abandoned oil pumps, a bar, a gravel road or a few nakes rooms. You really get the sense that you are THERE, in that bar, on that grovel road, in those romms - complicit. The light hovers austerily. The gruesome is at all times interlinked with the comic, even though this is by no means laugh out loud comedy. The grim with the surreal, that is perhaps what makes Blood simple so captivating.