I’m probably overthinking A Serious Man.

It’s hard to tell what, if anything, one should take seriously when it comes to the Coen Brothers. They’re so nonchalant about their genius that devoting any mental energy to finding deeper meaning in their work sometimes feels like you’re admiring the emperor’s new clothes. But A Serious Man really resonated with me, and I’m shocked at the collective shrug that’s greeted it from cinephiles and critics alike.

Maybe it’s just tailor-made for me. I love pretty much all of the Coens’ movies (even the largely reviled Ladykillers), but I’ve always had a special place in my heart for their most perplexing and cerebral works like Barton Fink and No Country For Old Men, films that happily subvert audience expectations and aren’t afraid to waft off into the ether without providing answers to their deeper questions. A Serious Man definitely finds them working in this mode, providing their own version of a religious parable, albeit one transplanted to a midwestern Jewish suburb in the 60′s. In short, it’s about a solid, uncomplicated guy tested by a God he doesn’t even know if he believes in with annoyances large and small. As someone who’s spent his entire life grappling with questions of faith, as a neurotic, and as a Coen Brothers fan, A Serious Man is a movie for me.

Really though, it’s a movie that should appeal to anyone who appreciates film, and that’s why I’m surprised it hasn’t made more waves. It finds some of the most celebrated filmmakers alive at their most personal – recreating the time and place in which they grew up, confronting characters based on people that must have held some importance to them – and philosophical. And by the time it gets to confronting the big questions, it refuses to pull its punches. God doesn’t necessarily exist by the end of this film, but there’s a good chance he does, and if he does, should he be loved or feared?

A Serious Man brilliantly illustrates the constant, nagging “What if it’s true?” that lingers in the mind of anyone raised in religion who falls away from it. It opens with a traditional Jewish parable to set the stage for the very non-traditional one that follows. A man is abandoned in the snow, and makes his way home with the help of a man who his wife later tells him died three years earlier. The only explanation for his appearance is that demons have possessed him because his family didn’t follow Jewish law when preparing his body for burial. *SPOILER* The supposedly dead man arrives a few minutes later and ends up fatally stabbed by the wife. In all likelihood, the woman, indoctrinated by religious dogma, has murdered a man because of fanatical belief in superstition. But what if she’s right and he was a demon, and by killing him she saved herself and her husband? The inner conflict faced by the film’s protagonist Larry Gopnik doesn’t involve the taking of lives like that of the wife in the film’s prologue or Abraham, whose portrait the camera lingers over in a pivotal scene, but he either A) has terrible luck, or B) is put in an unreasonable position by God and is then severely punished when he shows simple human frailty. The former seems silly to consider, but again, what if it’s true? *END SPOILER*

The film’s other master stroke is its realistic and highly-relatable depiction of a guy slowly driven nuts by a thousand tiny things; in other words, death by a thousand cuts. Larry faces big problems, like his wife leaving him and his job being put in jeopardy, but what really gets to him is his son pestering him about F Troop looking fuzzy on TV, and his daughter compulsively washing her hair, and the maddening calm of the guy his wife is leaving him for, and especially the Columbia Record Club and its evil collection agents intent on billing him for a copy of Santana’s Abraxas that he never even ordered. He could easily lose it in front of his wife or his kids, but his frustrations go inward and manifest themselves in his dreams, which become paranoid illustrations of his greatest triumphs and defeats.

Obviously, this is heady stuff. But it’s also the kind of genius filmmaking that we rarely get to see anymore. When I left the theater, a woman loudly proclaimed, “Well, that was terrible!” This has happened a couple of times before to me when leaving great but divisive films, like Eyes Wide Shut and Magnolia. A Serious Man belongs with weird, fantastic and important films like those, and deserves placement in the top tier of the Coens’ work.