Blood Simple
Blood Simple
The owner of a seedy small-town Texas bar discovers that one of his employees is having an affair with his wife. A chaotic chain of misunderstandings, lies, and mischief ensues after he devises a plot to have them murdered.
Evan May reviewedJune 17, 2025
Watched “Blood Simple.” Catching up on remaining titles in the Coen Brothers canon.
It’s a paradigm of the chaos-narrative that would characterize their films. Plots about butchered plotting. The potency of idiocy. Self-serving choices based on limited information direct a destructive path.
But a chaotic story doesn’t imply an amoral world. The events are meaningless only in the Ecclesiastes “under the sun” sense. There is an arc to the moral universe.
In the end, the abused finds her voice.