It’s been a remarkable year for directorial debuts on Blu-ray. We’ve had Cronos, Little Odessa, Body Heat and 12 Angry Men, and now StudioCanal have released the feature debut of Joel and Ethan Coen. Certainly a contender for the greatest debut as Blood Simple announces the Coens as filmmakers with an unerringly complete understanding of their craft.

There are few debuts as disarmingly confident as Blood Simple. It’s recognisably a Coen brothers film from the opening narration onwards, with their visual style, their flair for dialogue, and the disturbing violence all fully formed. It’s up there with the likes of Reservoir Dogs, Eraserhead and Sex Lies And Videotape in terms of a debut that immediately and decidedly establishes the director’s aesthetic.

Quentin Tarantino referred to it as “an arthouse film built on genre foundations,” and it’s a canny description – at least part of its success lies in the way the Coens manage to make it entirely on their own terms, by couching it in established film noir trademarks, inspiring a whole wave of neo-noirs set in the desert, like Red Rock West, One False Move and After Dark My Sweet.

The nasty, Texas-bound story draws heavily from James M. Cain and Dashiell Hammett – the title itself is a Hammett term – with a slick, mean-spirited plot, and hard-boiled, pulpy dialogue which never feels self-conscious or mannered. And rather than simply emulating the tropes of noir, it inverts them. Frances McDormand’s heroine is about as far from a femme fatale as you could imagine, but both of her romantic partners see her as such; the comically schlubby private eye is much more intelligent than he first appears, and unlike The Postman Always Rings Twice or similar, it’s not the adulterous couple who plot to murder the husband, but the other way around.

Abby (McDormand) is leaving her sleazy bar-owner husband Marty (Dan Hedaya) with the help of his barman Ray (John Getz), who she subsequently sleeps with. Angered by her betrayal, Marty hires a private detective, Visser (M. Emmet Walsh), to kill them. That’s the bare bones of the plot, but this being a Coen brothers film, nothing goes according to plan. Unlike more conventional noirs, with corrupt, backstabbing characters, most of the misunderstandings and conflicts arise from none of the characters speaking plainly to each other. Ray thinks Abby has killed Marty and is hiding it from him; Abby thinks Ray has killed Marty. The entire plot depends upon their inability to communicate.

In a different film, this would be a plot hole, but here, it’s a virtue. The seeds of mistrust are planted early enough that, once things spiral out of control, their paranoia feels entirely believable. Blood Simple is that rare film where as the film goes on, the characters know less about each other than at the start.

The Coens are often accused of being misanthropic filmmakers, of having a cynical view of humanity, and Blood Simple might be the strongest evidence for this. Its characters are all, if not unpleasant, then venal, greedy and a bit thick. They aren’t stupid, exactly; they just keep making stupid mistakes. Getz describes Ray as a combination of “Sharp, and not so sharp” and this could apply to any of the four main characters.

Even Visser isn’t immune. In one of the film’s most sinister moments, he actually says “Who looks stupid now?” (in a nod to The Ladykillers) he forgets a crucial bit of evidence, then spends the remainder of the film frantically trying to locate it.

The four central characters are all perfectly cast. McDormand is great as the innocent, guileless Abby, who for pretty much the whole film, has no idea what’s happening in the main plot. The film’s back half is almost like Repulsion in her descent into full-on paranoia, as she loses any confidence in who she can trust. Getz makes Ray an archetypal stoic, doomed, noir protagonist, miles away from his nuanced sleaze in The Fly; Hedaya does an incredible job at making the ostensible victim the most odious character in the film, and best of all is M. Emmett Walsh. His Texas drawl, high-pitched laugh and ill-fitting yellow suit should make him a figure of fun, and for the first half of the film that’s exactly what he seems to be. But at the halfway point he becomes something else entirely, leading to a terrifying final confrontation.

It’s an unflinchingly nasty film, too, with some moments that still make audiences wince today – the knife through the hand is perhaps the most infamous of these, but just as haunting is the scene where one character is buried alive. It’s up there with Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain in showing just how difficult it is to dispose of a body when it’s not quite dead, and might well be the single nastiest moment in any Coen brother film.

The great thing about the brother’s films, especially when remastered like this, is there are specific directorial flourishes that you look forward to seeing in 4K. In Blood Simple, there are so many of these moments – bulletholes creating beams of light in a darkened room; the newspaper flying in slow motion and hitting the screen door, jolting Abby out of her reverie, the wonderfully artificial looking effect of Abby falling backwards onto her bed, and most fun of all, the camera gliding along the bar, floating over an unconscious barfly before returning to its intended path.

It even marks the first collaboration with two key figures in the Coens’ filmography, with Carter Burwell’s haunting piano score and Barry Sonnenfeld’s distinct but unpretentious cinematography making their first appearances.

This release also makes clear just how much work has gone into presenting the film. The lighting and colour are particularly impressive, revealing details that were previously obscured by murkier picture quality. The Director’s Cut also streamlines the film considerably, getting into the thick of the story very quickly. I generally dislike directors altering their films after release, particularly debut films, which ought to retain some evidence of the rough edges their directors would later polish away. There are moments I miss here though, including Marty’s petty assholery and Visser’s parting insult: “Brother, you are disgusting.” But the revised version is undeniably effective, and often feels like we are watching an entirely new film.

The Coens would become more sophisticated and polished in their filmmaking, but I’m not sure they ever made a purer distillation of their recurring themes. Blood Simple is pure noir: seedy, darkly comic, and unfolding with a dreadful inevitability. A film about the paranoia and misunderstandings that turn small mistakes into catastrophes, and the fatal consequences of people simply failing to communicate. Blood Simple remains one of the great directorial debuts, and a remarkably complete introduction to the filmmakers the Coens would become.

Special Features

These include a selection of interviews with the Coens, M. Emmett Walsh and John Getz, although there are some missing from the previous blu-ray release from Studiocanal. Included here though are new featurettes, ‘Murder Is Hard the First Time: Designing ‘Blood Simple”; ‘Dead in the Heart of Texas: Filming ‘Blood Simple”; ‘You Better Make Sure He’s Dead: Carter Burwell and the Coen Brothers.’ I should also point out though, that the subtitles are… not great. There are a fair few glaring discrepancies from the spoken dialogue, and in a low-budget film like this, where dialogue is frequently muttered or buried in the sound mix, good subtitles are essential.

The remastered Blood Simple is out now from StudioCanal: amzn.dp/B0HGMCWY2H