A Serious Man (2009)

A Serious Man is a darkly comic, quietly unsettling portrait of one man’s life unraveling in 1967 suburban Minnesota. You follow Larry Gopnik, a mild-mannered Jewish physics lecturer whose seemingly stable life—tenure prospects, a looming bar mitzvah for his son, a conventional family—begins to disintegrate through a string of petty cruelties, humiliations and baffling setbacks. As his wife pursues a new relationship, his children drift away, his unemployed brother becomes a disruptive houseguest, a student’s strange behavior threatens his career, and anonymous attacks appear to sabotage his reputation, Larry searches for meaning and moral guidance from rabbis and the institutions of his faith—but receives little more than platitudes. Watching the film is an exercise in tonal balance: deadpan, meticulous humor sits alongside growing anxiety and existential dread. The Coen-esque direction keeps the camera steady and the moments precise, letting small absurdities accumulate until they feel overwhelming. The period detail and soundtrack evoke late-1960s suburban life, while Jewish ritual and scholarly questions about fate, justice and responsibility thread through the story. Expect to laugh at the film’s dry, black-comic moments and to feel increasingly uneasy as events pile up without neat explanations or consolatory answers. The storytelling resists easy catharsis—answers are elusive, authority figures are fallible, and the film’s conclusion remains ambiguous, leaving many of the film’s moral and spiritual questions unresolved. If you like sharp, character-driven dark comedies that mix satire with philosophical weight—and can sit with ambiguity and discomfort—this film delivers a compelling, singular experience that is both funny and deeply disquieting.

Actors: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Sari Lennick

Directors: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

Runtime: 106 min

Genres: Comedy, Drama

6.1 /10 88 /100 7.0 /10 7.3 /10