Blood Simple

Blood Simple (1985) is about a bar owner in Texas hiring someone to kill his wife and her lover. Marty hires a private detective. The man takes the money, prepares a faked photograph instead of killing them, then kills Marty and takes the money. Then it goes wrong. The entire construction rests on misunderstanding. Nobody knows what actually happened. Finding Marty on the floor, the lover Ray assumes Abby did it and goes to bury the body. Abby thinks Marty is alive. The detective realises he has lost something. Everyone acts without correct information and every move makes it worse. The audience knows everything, and the tension comes from that. It is the Coen brothers' first film. Joel was twenty nine and Ethan twenty six. To raise the money they shot a two minute promotional film first and showed it to small investors in Minnesota; the budget was collected in small shares. Barry Sonnenfeld photographed it and later became a director. A burial scene is the longest sequence and has almost no dialogue. In the last scene Abby stands behind a door not knowing who she has killed, and her final line sums up the whole idea. The title comes from a phrase in a Dashiell Hammett novel: the confused state a person falls into after a murder. The Coens later shortened and re-edited it; that version runs shorter. It runs 99 minutes. Good for: noir, the Coen brothers, and independent cinema. Less good for: the violence is graphic and the pace is deliberately slow.