For those of you who are regulars to our dark corner of the internet, you’ll know that we like to indulge in some “colourful” language. Fuck balls! Well, I’d also like to think that we try and get our facts correct before throwing expletives all over a film willy-nilly. Without fail, every review I’ve seen of A Serious Man has said this film is set in 1967. However, if you know anything about music at all, you’ll know that Santana’s album “Abraxas” was released in 1970 (don’t worry, all will become clear). Now, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter a whole lot, but it’s the little things that count. Plus, if you’re gonna review a fucking film you should at least do the fucker properly.

Anyway, maths professor Larry Gopnik’s (Michael Stuhlbarg) world unravels when his wife (Sari Lennick) asks him for a divorce. This starts a chain of events in quick succession: Larry’s mentally unstable brother, (Richard Kind) who sleeps on the sofa, won’t leave; a student offers Larry a bribe for a passing grade that leads to him being sued; he receives unexpected angry calls from a Columbia Record Club debt collector and his teenage kids ignore his existence unless the reception on their television needs fixing. As Larry’s life slowly falls down around him, he asks the question, “why me?” and endeavours to seek the answer from a number of rabbis, whose parables offer little help to alleviate his anxiety and fear.

A Serious Man is the Coen Brothers 14th film as directors (if you count the shit “un-Coen-style” films and leave out the film segments they directed) and for me it’s a return to form. I fucking loved No Country For Old Men – it was one of my favourite films of last year – but Burn After Reading (see my review HERE) left me feeling a little cold. However, with A Serious Man Ethan and Joel have left behind the overt slapstick of Burn in favour of a more Barton Fink-style, low-key anti-religious parable set in an American Jewish community.

Undoubtedly, everyone will have a different interpretation of A Serious Man, but for me it came down to a clash between rationalism and faith. In one sequence, Larry finds out that his pot-smoking son has been receiving records from a music club without his knowledge. In his argument with an employee over the phone, Larry repeatedly rejects the album “Abraxas” by Santana. For those who aren’t well-up on their Gnostic terminology, Abraxas is a term for God. When Larry says, “I did not order Abraxas, I don’t want Abraxas, I won’t listen to Abraxas,” he is in effect rejecting God. Rationality tells Larry that there is no reason for his life to fall apart, but when the arse falls out of his world he has no choice but to turn to the religious institutions in which he grew up in. They offer Larry less answers than his dreams do, increasing his sense of helplessness. In all of this, you're reminded that although things are bad, they can get a whole lot worse.

Okay, all I’ve done is tell you what I think the film is about, but is it any fucking good? Well, it fucking is! If you’re anything like the guy in the cinema who kept on kicking the back of my seat because he was bored out of his tit, then you’ll get nothing from this film. I resisted the temptation to stab him in the face because I knew he had diarrhoea for brains and I think he was just trying to convince the girl he was with that he was intelligent. However, if you're anything like me, A Serious Man is a pessimistic, cynically dark comedy, that is immensely funny, but at the same time, overwhelmingly uneasy. Plus, there’s not many films you’ll see this year that’ll leave you with a double cliffhanger ending...A Serious Man is typical Coen Brothers and I fucking loved it!

Stoked I got to review this and not New Moon out of 5