I didn’t think the Coen brothers could top No Country For Old Men, their Oscar-winning masterpiece (which I wrote about here). But A Serious Man comes awfully close. This is a film unlike anything the Coens have ever done, and yet it fits perfectly into their oeuvre. It’s a film about God, man, and the peculiar way that the two relate. And it’s a film that will haunt and provoke you far after you leave the theater.

Stylistically, Man is further proof that the Coens are among the most masterful directors working in Hollywood today. Few other filmmakers are as skillful at the art of employing editing in the service of suggestion and insinuation. As in No Country, the Coens let much go unsaid in Man… and yet so much is implied. So much is clearly hinted at. The Coens’ impressive restraint and pervasive ambiguity only adds to the provocative, head-scratching, deeply unsettling quality of this film.

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Trailers have gotten so sophisticated lately it seems wrong not to talk about them. Take for example the 94-second teaser for the new film by Joel and Ethan Coen, A Serious Man. It’s one of the most inventive trailers of the year, maybe of the last several years. The beauty of it is that it doesn’t reveal the particulars of the plot but instead imparts us with a feeling, an impression, which may indeed prove more valuable to the undecided viewer.

It begins with the sound of a body hitting something hard, rhythmically, as if part of a jazz ensemble. The body belongs to a frazzled bespectacled man, presumably the titular character, who seems dangerously close to a nervous breakdown. As the trailer proceeds, more noises (coughs, tire screeches, the recurring line “We’re gonna be fine”) are added to the ensemble to create a symphony of angst. We can guess that the film will be about an ordinary man ungluing, and that’s all we really need to know, except of course that it’s directed by the Coen brothers and will therefore be a supremely proficient piece of entertainment. The expressionistic use of sound in this trailer suggests Joel and Ethan had a hand in editing it. A scrolling list of previous credits establishes their hipster credentials, but it seems superfluous—I’m already there.

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