A few scattershot thoughts on this after my second viewing:
Quickly becoming one of my favourite Coen Bros films. Taut with tension from beginning to end, with the classic screwball caper vibe that would become their trademark style.
It wasn’t until after I finished this viewing that I read that the burial sequence lasts thirteen minutes without a single line of spoken dialogue. That scene feels to me like it lasts maybe four minutes. One of the best scenes that the Coens ever shot, and perhaps the saddest.
I was thinking about the Coens’ style, and how influenced they were by screwball comedy and noir. But it’s apparent to me on my second viewing of this that they were also deeply influenced by horror (particularly their stint working on Raimi films). Blood Simple, No Country for Old Men, Barton Fink, and even certain scenes in True Grit have elements of a horror lineage that can be traced directly back to the sort of work Raimi was doing with Evil Dead. Blood Simple might be the most horror-influenced of them all, though.
Frances McDormand is incredible in this. Her performance reminds me a lot of Sigourney Weaver’s in Alien (which would make an excellent pairing with this film).
Also, for whatever it’s worth, the 4K disc from Criterion is impeccable, and blows the streaming version on the Criterion Channel out of the water. That’s to be expected, of course, but I didn’t expect how transformative the disc would be. The film looks like an entirely different animal on disc compared to streaming it. Highly recommended for fans of the movie.