What is Neo Noir?

Neo noir is a genre directly related to film noir, neo noir is basically film noir but with more modern shooting and storytelling while many themes and lighting techniques and Mise en Sene from contemporary noir are used. Contemporary noir themes of cynicism, suspicion, dead ends and darkness are used in neo noir as well as specific characters and roles like feme fatals and hard boiled protagonists are recycled into modern stories with new twists. Some cinematic features of film noir are replicated in neo noirs like Sin City despite technology allowing otherwise has chosen to be black and white, preserving the contemporary noir ambiance and classic feel of grittiness and claustrophobia.


Brick 2005 Directed by Rian JohnsonBrendan Frye is a student of a nameless American High School who finds his ex-girlfriend murdered on the school campus and takes on the challenge of finding her murderer himself. After a frenzied phone call with her the day she was murdered, mentioning “the Brick is bad” Brendan suspects she had fallen in with the drug addict clique. The dark and suspicion fuelled story line and a protagonist searching for answers is a classic recipe for a film noir but modern shooting techniques and setting make it more relevant to today’s audience.

Sin city 2005 Directed by Frank MillerFour tales of crime adapted from Frank Miller's popular comics, focusing around a muscular brute who's looking for the person responsible for the death of his beloved Goldie, another man fed up with Sin City's corrupt law enforcement who takes the law into his own hands after a horrible mistake, a cop who risks his life to protect a girl from a deformed paedophile and a hitman looking to make some cash. The black and white colour scheme marks it out as something different and gives the whole film a nostalgic feeling, the dark characters and the plots they follow are distinctly noir-esque but it is all set in a modern 21 century city.

Blade Runner 1984 Directed by Ridley Scott Deckard is a Blade Runner, a police man of the future who hunts down and terminates replicants, artificially created humans with limited life spans. He wants to get out of the force, but is drawn back in when 4 "skin jobs" (a slang term for replicants) hijack a ship back to Earth to seek out there creators to find a way to live longer than four years. The oriental city that Deckard must search for his prey is huge, smoky and claustrophobic which makes a fine setting for a noir film, modern or classic. The sense that the enemy may be among us in disguise is a theme in noir cinema that can be applied to any vehicle of paranoia in a society of the time, in the 30s and 40s it was the secret police in Europe and in the 80s it was communists and A-bombs, this film brings back that look-over-your-shoulder feel to the cinema that classic noirs mastered and re-models it to a science fiction fantasy that revives the most themes and techniques from the 40s