The Coen brothers’ debut from 1984 is this superb, slightly atypical classic (which got a little-known and rather baffling Chinese-language remake from Zhang Yimou in 2009 entitled A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop). The original is now getting a rerelease: a gripping, drum-tight noir masterpiece to compare with Touch of Evil.

Apart from everything else, it has one of the most disturbing nightmare scenes I have ever sat through. Yet for all the mastery with which it is written and planned out, right down to the spectacular final line and the eerie brilliance of the dying man’s point of view, Blood Simple does not hint – or does so only indirectly – at the more prolix wit, the verbal, visual riffing and offbeat wackiness of the Coens’ later gems. Judging from this, I think I would have guessed at a career closer to that of John Dahl, director of Red Rock West and The Last Seduction. How wrong.

Frances McDormand’s Abby is no stereotypical shady lady, but an entirely plausible, flawed woman who is married to a brutal and emotionally inadequate bar owner, Julian, played with magnificent menace by Dan Hedaya. Abby has fallen in love with Ray (John Getz), who serves drinks at Julian’s place. Seething with jealous rage, Julian hires a private investigator of revolting sleaze: Visser, a show-stopping performance from M Emmet Walsh, with his stetson and perennial sheen of sweat. I had forgotten about the extraordinary closeups of flies settling on his glistening, jowly face, to which he is indifferent, like a lizard. He is given a captivatingly strange speech to start the film, concluding bleakly: “What I know about is Texas, and down here you’re on your own…” Julian gets this unspeakable man to take more direct action against his wife and her lover. But with diabolic inspiration, Julian has his own kind of extra revenge, taunting Ray with the allegation that Abby is cheating on him too.

The detailed sound design is inspired: the ghostly whine of a phone receiver left off the hook seems to intuit the couple’s inner anxiety – and so does the insistent two-tone blip-blip of Julian’s computer. It still makes me jump when the electric fly-zapper crackles at the most tense point in the confrontation between Julian and Ray. And it is deeply disturbing when Abby and Ray are staring at each other aghast, and a thrown newspaper floats towards them, apparently in slow-motion, and thumps the storm door. I had forgotten something else, from that unwatchably horrible confrontation in which Walsh’s predatory detective has his entire head pressed into a broken pane of glass: the jagged, broken shard pokes into his dangling earlobe, tweaking it back and forth.

The idea of a shot man coming back to life gives the film an uncanny, almost supernatural atmosphere. There is a Lazarus at the film’s centre: a metaphorical and almost literal return from the dead, which is entirely believable and gives the final reveal its shiver of fear. There’s nothing simple about it.