So this is the Coen Brothers’ first movie. I’d never really heard much about it — everyone seems to treat Raising Arizona as their first notable movie for whatever reason — so I was sort of curious as to whether it would really feel like one of their movies or not.

The answer is that it mostly does. The start of the story is that a woman is leaving her husband, and sleeps with another guy in the process; the husband gets mad and wants them dead, and from there it spirals out of control into a morass of betrayal, deceit, accidents, misunderstandings, and total fuckups. So that’s pretty much straight up their normal alley.

Where it feels maybe less Coen-like is that it’s played fairly seriously. Their whole thing is dark comedy, and this does still fall into that bucket, but it trends more toward the dark than the comedy — the situations are still absurd, but mostly on a moment-by-moment basis it’s played straight, with heavy tension and lots of noirish shadows.

My guess is that this probably wouldn’t make the top of anyone’s list of Best Coen Brothers Movies, but tbh that’s mostly because they’ve made a lot of great movies. Taking this on its own, it’s really good, and it doesn’t at all feel like a first movie.

ALSO: The woman in the movie is Frances McDormand; she was apparently around 27 years old, and she looks like a wee baby. If she didn’t have such a distinctive face, I wouldn’t even be sure it was her.