Critics reviews

Visser is a study in greed and grift who delights in pitting his victims against each other, and he’s the only one of the Coens’ monsters who doesn’t have a dogged cop on his trail. Where both Fargo and No Country For Old Men were styled as meditations on good versus evil (with good represented by the cops played by Frances McDormand and Tommy Lee Jones), Blood Simple is a film without heroes: Its West is truly wild.

With every word [the four principal characters] speak, the distances between them expand. All of the violence and death in Blood Simple derives from miscommunication. This accounts for the film's tone, an unusual synthesis of horror and farce.

The film cannot be reduced to its body count, because the Coens aim to break genre cinema's glass ceiling of so-called style over substance. Some of it is rather puerile play with the medium itself, as when Ray's car, which won't start, itself momentarily halts Carter Burwell's piano score. Most of the film, however, reforms cinematic meaning from within its archetypes.

It builds pure tension through dumpster fires, bug zappers, and rotting fish, all culminating in a fittingly grisly finale.

The brothers instantly demonstrate their knack for coaxing beautifully offbeat performances from their actors; Walsh in particular is delectably sleazy, speaking his lines in a sneering Texas drawl that makes every word sound as if it's turned rancid. And then there's Carter Burwell's score [...which] manages to evoke a palpable sense of dread with a simple piano theme. Insofar as their name signifies an aesthetic, the Coen brothers were fully formed right from the get-go.

There's a simple magnetism inherent in this kind of filmmaking, and the Coens know how to orchestrate it. They extend one particular character's death to exhausting length, so that the audience's nerves have been pan-seared by the time he's buried alive in a patch of soft Texas soil. But they also complicate the recipe, making Abby a mightily complex femme fatale, one who's more aloof and disinterested than diabolical.

The Coens' first film, and still one of their most beloved, lays out so many of what would become their typical motifs: adulterous lovers, mistaken identity, ruthless small-time businessmen, deceptions and double-crosses galore. Sure, these are the common building blocks of film noir, but in the Coens' hands — with their visual meticulousness, their bitter humor, their Olympian perspective on human frailty — these elements found new life.

Only after [Spoiler] gets shot does it really take off, soaring into slow-motion abstraction, a comedy of errors with the haunting desolation and ethereal score of a John Carpenter movie. On this evidence - and despite their rep as masters of dialogue - the Coens should talk as little as possible.

It has the benefit of being their first feature and therefore imbued with a certain enthusiasm and respect for its characters, regardless of their many flaws. The result is the Coen brothers' most suspenseful and terrifying movie that was not adapted from Cormac McCarthy.

The shoestring budget dictates regional starkness and low-rent motels, but no indie frugality for Joel and Ethan Coen, envisioning themselves already as honky-tonk Kubricks... The characters are kept in the dark from each other's machinations, but the filmmakers see all -- Lang circa Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, perhaps, but the Coens remain fastidiously indifferent to the plight of their creations, the better to concentrate on the dazzle of their doom.

It's so derivative -- of Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain and a thousand and one noirs -- that who or what is being ripped off is essentially beside the point.

Stands as a high watermark in American independent cinema, a brilliantly plotted and scabrously funny thriller that tweaked the noir genre for a more knowing modern sensibility. With few characters and limited means, the Coens crafted a model of low-budget efficiency and ingenuity, but what makes Blood Simple so enduring is how it mingles the messy business of crime with ordinary, desperate people who don't have a knack for it.