You might not think of the film as a horror movie, but it definitely is one.

A Serious Man isn't a movie to be "solved." There's no secret meaning, no answer in the goy's teeth. It's a film that revels in its paradoxes because those paradoxes illustrate what it means to be Jewish right from the opening parable about the dybbuk. Arguably Joel and Ethan Coen's most oblique movie since Barton Fink, A Serious Man is also the brothers' most straightforward examination of their Jewish upbringing and how it crashes up against their American roots. To be Jewish is itself a paradox—an outsider always living among other communities waiting for …