Black Sun, White Heat: Dark Cinema for the Summer Season

Vogue

26-06-2025

In the new film Hot Milk, the sensual but diffident 20-something Sofia (Emma Mackey) travels with her invalid mother, Rose (Fiona Shaw), to the Mediterranean shores of Spain in search of an experimental cure for the latter's (possibly hypochondriac) illness. But the sun-scorched resort town also supplies an opportunity for Sofia to swim and sunbathe alongside a fellow German tourist, Ingrid (Vicky Krieps), whose permissive lifestyle clashes sharply with Rose's. Soon, the pouty Sofia—a near-doppelgänger for Jane Birkin, circa 1969—embraces the erotic languor she experiences in her mother's absence. Yet what sounds like the start of a frothy tale of sexual awakening turns blackly suspenseful as Sofia's simmering resentments and desire for liberation pit her against Rose in a battle for familial control.
Based on the 2016 novel by Deborah Levy—whose previous work Swimming Home, from 2011, also makes use of the villa holiday to probe themes of sexual longing and family ties—Hot Milk's blend of summery climate and dark eroticism fits into a distinctive cinematic legacy. Instead of the twilit settings and bleak, urban climes that define classical film noir, the summer noir—or, perhaps, 'vacation thriller'—highlights characters suffering from the corrupting dangers of too much sunlight, a Victorian phobia for the combination of environmental heat and recreative estrangement that can breed a kind of morbid, hothouse atmosphere of moral lassitude.
European cinema helped to produce much of summer noir's lexicon of themes, settings, and archetypes: Its fascination with the storied decadence of the leisure class—and the profligate rituals of the seasonal tourist—appeared in earlier film satires by Jean Renoir and Jacques Tati. But summer noir's focus on the images of sun-soaked flesh and seething nihilism dovetailed most closely with the post-'60s era, which had pushed moral and aesthetic regimes to new extremes.
On the occasion of Hot Milk's release, Vogue has put together a list of some of summer noir's best entries. Whether it is Alain Delon wasting away in the canyons of the Cote d'Azur or Mimsy Farmer shooting heroin on the beaches of Ibiza, these films reveal that too much daylight has its own kind of darkness—and that the pleasures of seasonal debauchery can often lead to the tragedy of a permanent vacation.
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)