Neo-Noir's Neon Problem: When Style Stands In for Substance

Sat, 16 Mar 2024 13:00:00 +0000

There is a particular image that neo-noir has spent the last fifteen years falling in love with. A lone figure, half-lit, standing in a corridor or a car or a hotel room bathed in aggressive magenta and cyan, holding a pose while a synthesiser throbs on the soundtrack. It is a gorgeous image. It has launched a thousand posters and ten thousand Instagram grids. And it is the exact point where the modern crime film keeps getting into trouble, because that image is doing so much work to feel meaningful that a filmmaker can forget to make it be meaningful. This is neon-noir’s central problem, and it is worth diagnosing precisely, because the same technique that produces the genre’s best recent work also produces its emptiest.

Film Aesthetics - vo.rs

Neo-Noir's Neon Problem: When Style Stands In for Substance