Classic noir, for all its plot twists, is built around a pretty straightforward dynamic. The scheming femme fatale seductress entices some schmoe into murder and/or other criminality. Schmoe follows his dick into disaster, death, and righteous retribution. Woman dies too. That’s the story.
Neo-noir of the 1980s and 90s, like Body Heat or Wild Things, would sometimes vary the narrative by punishing the man but not the woman as a kind of feminist statement. The view of women as ruthless schemers, though, stayed more or less intact.
Some genre exercises like Hit Man, in contrast, have challenged the misogyny at the genre’s core in more thoroughgoing ways. That’s the case, too, for Philippe Lacôte’s thoughtful and surprisingly empathetic Killer Heat, streaming on Prime Video on September 26.
The schmoe here is Nick Bali (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an American detective slumming in Greece to escape mysterious family troubles at home. The (sort of) femme fatale is Penelope Vardakis (Shailene Woodley), who hires Nick to investigate the climbing death of her brother-in-law, Leo Vardakis (Richard Madden), on Crete. The Vardakis family is wealthy and dominate the island; as a result the death is quickly declared an accident. But Penelope’s suspicious—and Nick’s investigation quickly leads him to suspect Penelope’s husband, and Leo’s identical twin, Elias (also played by Madden.)
From there the narrative takes as many turns and switchbacks and head fakes as you’d expect form a noir. The key difference is in the treatment of misogyny.
Penelope’s secretive, but it’s not because she’s an innately corrupt and corrupting seductress. Her marriage to Elias is abusive and soul-crushing. He cheats, but when she tries to leave, he threatens her with suicide or murder—threats all the more credible because he controls the entire island they’re living on.
As for Nick, we learn that his wife wanted to leave him too—and he, like Elias, reacted with jealousy and rage. In traditional noir, women who want to get out of their marriages are presented as home-breakers and manipulators. But in Killer Heat, the assumption is that women who want to leave (or even women who want to sleep with someone other than their husbands) are entitled to do what they want with their own bodies. The problem isn’t women’s “betrayal.” It’s men’s jealousy, and the explicit and implicit violence that they use jealousy to justify.
In this context, Woodley, with her girl next door good looks and affect, is perfectly cast. The iconic noir villains, like Barbara Stanwyck or Kathleen Turner, are icy sophisticates, who exude sex appeal like malice, and vice versa. Woodley, in contrast, is (obviously) movie-star attractive. But she’s often tentative and uncertain—a human rather than a force of nature. Even when she’s calculating, she’s vulnerable—as opposed to the classic femme fatales, who are calculating even when they seem vulnerable.
Perhaps the most telling part of this dynamic is that allowing Penelope to be a person also gives Nick space to be a person, rather than a lust-driven, amoral patsy. He’s a drunk and a fuck-up, in classic weak-man noir style. But he still can choose, at each moment, to be a worse or a better person—and can choose whether to lean into his own misogyny, or reject it.
And what’s true for Nick is also true for the other men in the film; Penelope doesn’t make men fall in love or lust with her. The way they treat her, and the way they treat their own desire and jealousy, is up to them. By abandoning the misogynist view of women as supervillains, the film creates space for men to be human beings rather than just victims.
The plot doesn’t have the bleak, inevitable power of the best classic noir; Philippe Lacôte is not Billy Wilder. But in thinking through how noir is built on misogyny, and undoing that knot of hate and dehumanization, Killer Heat does something with the genre that Wilder couldn’t. On that basis alone, even if it had no other virtues (and it has many) it’d be worth seeing.