- How “In a Lonely Place” Changed Noir’s Direction (May 5, 2026)
There’s something the matter with Dix Steele—the protagonist in Dorothy B. Hughes’ 1947 novel In a Lonely Place and in its 1950 adaptation of the same name directed by Nicholas Ray—and the women around him sense it.
You could call it feminine intuition. The detective in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” does so when Grace Kelly’s Lisa voices the idea that a woman would never leave home without her purse and valuable jewelry. “That feminine intuition stuff sells magazines, but in real life it’s still a fairy tale,” the detective says. But Lisa is right: the woman across the courtyard didn’t leave; she was murdered by her husband.
Ray and screenwriters Andrew P. Solt and Edmund H. North do an excellent job of translating this “intuition” that Hughes carefully kneads into her novel, despite its adherence to Dix’s perspective. It’s an intuition, or gut feeling, that few remark upon when talking about Hughes’ masterwork, and Ray’s adaptation of it. And what a shame that is, for Hughes’ understanding and articulation of feminine intuition has impacted not only noir as a genre, but also how “bad guys” have come to be represented in American stories.
At one point in Ray’s film, Humphrey Bogart’s Dix nearly beats to death a young man whose car he crashes into. At the crossroads of love and fear, his girlfriend Laurel (Gloria Grahame) heads to Dix’s friend Brub Nicolai’s home. She’s there not to see Brub (Frank Lovejoy), who is a detective, but his wife, Sylvia (Jeff Donnell).
Dix is a screenwriter who is suspected of murder. His sardonic sense of humor, along with his understanding of how a murderer’s mind works, courtesy of his writerly imagination and sensibilities, has not done him any favors in persuading others that he is innocent. Laurel has mostly been convinced of Dix’s innocence, but doubts begin creeping in as Dix becomes increasingly violent and paranoid.
“There is something strange about Dix, isn’t there?” Laurel says with hesitation. “I keep worrying about it, I stay awake nights trying to find out what it is.” But after every one of his outbursts, Dix overcompensates with love, showering Laurel with gifts, making her feel guilty about her thoughts. Sylvia tells Laurel to tell Dix how she feels. “What can I say to him, ‘I love you, but I’m afraid of you’?” Laurel asks incredulously.
“You should go away for a while, I really think you should,” says Sylvia, regretting the words as soon as they’ve been uttered. “I came here because I wanted to say these things out loud and be laughed at,” Laurel responds. “But you’re not laughing.” Sylvia isn’t laughing because she senses what Laurel senses, what is incomprehensible to Brub: Dix’s violence. Sylvia has sensed it from the start. And Sylvia, like Lisa, is right: Bogart’s Dix, though cleared of murder, almost chokes Laurel to death when she tries to leave him.
On the face of it, Hughes’ story is told from the perspective of, and about, Dix, a young man who found life’s greatest joy during WWII as a fighter pilot. Flying allowed him to rise above the “crawling earth,” the desperately ordinary folks whom Dix feels superior to. Dix hates women most of all: “They were all alike, cheats, liars, whores. Even the pious ones were only waiting for a chance to cheat and lie and whore.” After the war, Dix yearns for something more dynamic than purpose, he is looking for “that feeling of power and exhilaration and freedom that came with loneliness in the sky.” He finds it in two places: standing at a promontory overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and in raping and murdering women.
Dix reconnects with Brub, a friend from the Air Corps, and when he learns that Brub is a detective investigating the murders that Dix has been committing, Dix is elated. He endears himself to Brub because the feeling of being close to the man hunting him excites him. Brub falls into an easy friendship with his old Army pal, scarcely suspecting him of being a murderer, but his wife is a bit more guarded. (Ray’s adaptation differs from Hughes’s story in one essential aspect: Bogart’s Dix is innocent of murder.) On the face of it, Hughes’ story is about a modern Raskolnikov. But faces often mislead.
Hughes was writing In a Lonely Place at a time when postwar America was reckoning with the fact of men returning from combat and the rise of McCarthyism. At the moment of its cultural immediacy, noir best and most often commingled like strands of DNA, articulating or commenting on two ideas. The first is the repossession of public space by men returning from war, what scholar Christopher Breu describes as more a “cultural reassertion of male power and privilege” than what is typically described as white men’s anxiety around women in the workplace. A reassertion is more violent, active, and intentional than an anxious response or reaction, Breu convincingly argues. This reassertion and repossession pushed women back into the private realm. The second idea that noir articulates is “the privatization of public life and suppression of collective political activity produced by the anticommunist purges” of the time, Breu writes.
Dix is a criticism in negative relief, through logical extension, of both the misogyny of the time and the encroachments that law, represented by Brub, and surveillance culture made into civilians’ private lives. Hughes achieves this dual criticism through her third-person narration: we are both understanding of Dix and repulsed by Dix. We learn his thoughts, we understand his paranoia, his hatred of having his life intruded upon by the surveilling eyes of others, and we clearly see that he hates women.
Bogart does a tremendous job of humanizing Dix, carrying in his furrowed brows and defeated eyes the look of a man disappointed by his friends, who suspect him, who might sell him out to the authorities. And we’re also afraid of Bogart’s Dix—I would not want to be alone with him when he is drunk, when he white knuckles at words that hurt his fragile feelings, when he violently careens his car over switchbacks, when he beats up a man he already almost killed. I understand, viscerally, why Laurel wants to escape him in secret, for to break things off with him would, and indeed does, incite a lethal rage.
But though Dix is the story’s protagonist, it is not simply through his figure (his criticisms of the society around him and his hatred of women) that we receive a scathing criticism of the world Hughes was writing in.
Dix doesn’t like Sylvia; he doesn’t like how she looks at him. Her gaze is always changing on him, one moment she’s warm, the other she’s distant. Unpredictable. “Behind her civilized attention, her humor, her casualness, he wasn’t certain [about her],” Hughes’ narration reads. “Something was there behind the curtain of her eyes, something in the way she looked at Dix, a look behind the look.” Sylvia doesn’t look at Dix so much as she sees him, studies him, “probing him with her mind.” Brub tells Dix later that Sylvia has a knack for seeing people, seeing what lies beneath their layers of propriety. Dix doesn’t like Sylvia because he can’t seem to manipulate her, because she looks back at him.
Hughes has us see women as Dix sees them. Dix’s gaze is violent, just as obsessive and invasive as the state’s; both extreme and real in its proportions, his look is a blistering criticism of misogyny’s endemic violence. Often, women are seen as objects of Dix’s desire or wrath. Laurel is seen, not allowed subjectivity. But the same cannot be said for Sylvia, because through her, Hughes does something subtly revolutionary: she allows a subjectivity to persist despite Dix’s objectifying gaze.
This is why Hughes makes sure to detail Dix’s discomfort around Sylvia. In her resistance to his outward charm, in the frustration and discomfort she causes Dix with her looks, Hughes allows a feminine subjectivity to exist in a novel that is otherwise entirely a study of a masculine subjectivity. Hughes writes a gaze that, long before Laura Mulvey posits the objectifying masculine gaze, objectifies the objectifier. A reaction to the repossession.
Ray seems to understand Sylvia’s role acutely. The first time Donnell’s Sylvia appears on screen, she doesn’t say anything for the longest while. As Bogart’s Dix playfully accuses Brub of not watching enough whodunits, Sylvia smiles, but keeps her eyes locked onto Dix, and Ray’s lens remains locked onto her gaze. “We solve every murder in less than two hours,” Dix says off-frame, and Sylvia just watches. A concerned, considering expression furrows her brows as Dix poses her and Brub on chairs to enact the murderer’s last moments with his victim, so that Brub can get into the killer’s headspace.
As Dix passionately recreates the physical and psychological mise en scène of the murder, and as Sylvia’s expression becomes more and more concerned, Brub, enthralled by Dix’s narration, almost chokes Sylvia. Sylvia is the only one to remain outside of Dix’s story. “Brub, stop it,” she gasps finally.
Sylvia’s presence isn’t like Brub’s in that she is not a representative of the state; she is a mere housewife. Megan Abbott, in her afterword to the New York Review of Books edition of In a Lonely Place, describes Sylvia’s role within the book as an upturning of noir convention, detaching archetype from expected gender. In traditional noirs, the protagonist is a Philip Marlowe, a cantankerous character but also morally clean, a good guy who solves the crime.
In In a Lonely Place, the protagonist is morally murky, and it is the women who save the day. “As [Hughes’ story] unfolds, we gradually understand that the danger is not without but within,” Abbott writes. “And it is Laurel and Sylvia who prove to be the real detectives here, the hard-boiled ‘dicks’ uncovering Dix’s secrets, while Dix himself is the threat, the contaminant. The femme fatale turns out to be an homme.”
While it is the case that Hughes plays with archetypes, I would argue that she also presents us with something delicate and intuitively familiar: a leaning into the lessons accrued from the experience of a gendered being-in-the-world. The role reversal that Abbott describes suggests a masculinization of the women characters, which is not exactly what happens in both the book and the film. Laurel becomes suspicious of Dix not as a result of a lay detective work, but from observation of his violence, tallying it up against her experience of abusive men. Sylvia, too, doesn’t go after Dix; rather, she watches him in her home. Dix’s destructiveness is manifest, but only the women around him sense it with certainty.
Mid-century women were expected to stay within the domestic realm. In Ray’s film, Laurel’s is the story of a woman becoming domesticated. Grahame’s Laurel practically moves into Dix’s apartment as he writes his next screenplay, looking after him like a mother. And as she leans further into the femininity expected of her, she becomes more and more frightened and suspicious of Dix, and on the night of their engagement, she decides finally to run. As she becomes more and more feminine, she sees what Sylvia, the epitome of femininity, sees: a violent man.
Most women learn at a very young age how to move around men. Patriarchy allows toxic masculinity to run unchecked, leaving everyone else to figure out how to survive. Sylvia is apprehensive of Dix because he is the kind of man a woman, with her lived experience and understanding of what men are allowed to get away with, has learned to be wary of. Most women learn to be wary: the girl Dix stalks at the very beginning of the novel, the one he kills at the novel’s end, feels Dix following him. As he is following her, she hears him: “He knew she heard him for her heel struck an extra beat, as if she half stumbled, and her steps went faster. […] She was afraid.” The only thing that stops Dix in his hunt is a car that lambasts him with its beams.
The detective in “Rear Window” might describe the girl’s hastening pace as feminine intuition, her sensing that someone is behind her, but it is more aptly described as what women learn to do to survive under patriarchy. We learn to be wary of certain types of men, and we teach each other the signs that hint at violence, clues pointing to danger.
This is not to say that we always survive, but it is to say that being a woman in this world is exhausting and dangerous. It is to say that Sylvia and Laurel are first and foremost women under patriarchy, and have learned how men work. These are characters who, even as they take on masculine narratological roles, also embody the negative side of womanhood: the necessity of vigilance. Even as they take on masculine archetypes, they also, in a beguiling contradiction, lean into the requirements of womanhood.
In her seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” scholar Laura Mulvey describes the kind of “looking” that is performed in many films. The viewer identifies with the protagonist, who often and only looks at women with an objectifying and fetishizing gaze, which in turn has us as viewers colluding in flattening feminine figures. But Hughes, through Sylvia’s gaze that makes Dix squirm, and then Ray through Laurel, who grows uneasy as she watches Bogart’s Dix, offers us women who look back as they are being watched, who put forth a subjectivity that yearns to turn away from the protagonist that we as audiences have grown intimate with.
This subjectivity glistens in Donnell’s eyes as she watches Bogart’s Dix at her dinner table; this subjectivity is the sadness in Grahame’s Laurel’s voice as she looks at Sylvia, saying, “You’re not laughing.” This is a subjectivity that complicates our understanding of traditional noir and the workings of cinema itself, because Hughes, in 1947, showed us what it looks like for women to look back at the men looking at them.
“From Patricia Highsmith and Jim Thompson to Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Harris, nearly every ‘serial killer’ tale of the last seventy years bears [In a Lonely Place’s] imprint — both in terms of its sleek, relentless style, and its claustrophobic ‘mind of the criminal’ perspective,” writes Abbott. We see it in “The Cell” and in “The Silence of the Lambs,” where Jodie Foster’s Clarice looks confidently and unwaveringly back at Hannibal Lecter, making his heart race and skip. We can see Hughes’ influence in pretty much any film that features an antihero explaining his psyche to his pursuers, thereby endearing us to them even if for a moment. It’s there, too, in “Rear Window,” a film in which women save the day through action and psychological understanding.
Ira Levin’s 1953 novel A Kiss Before Dying feels beholden to In a Lonely Place. Levin uses third-person narration to make us intimate comrades of Bud Corliss, a homicidal protagonist who is an ex-GI and who hates women and yearns for wealth. And even as he is misogynistic, we are still made to sympathize with him because we understand him, his feeling of being an outlaw working against a state that sends young men to war, kindling a taste for killing, and that unequally distributes wealth. Most importantly, though, it is in homing in on Bud’s flailing—he sweats a lot—in moments of detection, specifically detection by women, that harkens back to Hughes. The power of a woman’s look can crumple a man.
In a Lonely Place is an endlessly complex work, a story through which Hughes tackles many beasts, the most bedeviling of which is the monster that is womanhood under patriarchy. Few works explicate as intricately as In a Lonely Place does the work of femininity, the feminine intuition that is really gut feeling that is really survival tactics. Hughes wields this grim understanding of gender and spins it into something empowering: the female gaze. When it comes to poignant or culturally resonant noirs, I wonder if we forget to credit Hughes for her defining work, for showing us how to look back at the scary men who objectify us.
- Milwaukee Film Festival 2026: Making Waves, With Movies, Along the Shores of Lake Michigan (May 5, 2026)
Milwaukee, like the rest of the contemporary American Midwest, is increasingly making a name for itself as a place that nurtures, showcases, and facilitates access to creative excellence. Most recently, it was announced that the city will be receiving the world-renowned Michelin Guide. Like Chicago, its stunning lakefront’s infrastructure centers cars over people, and its film festival is weeks long with programming designed to serve its community by bringing important, passionate stories to their proverbial backyard.
I’ve been to Milwaukee many times, yet it was my first-ever visit to the festival. Having attended only six of the fifteen days of screenings, I still managed to squeeze in over a baker’s dozen films and events (and a Brewers game), evidence of the city’s and festival’s abundance and vitality.
Milwaukee Film, the organizing entity for the film festival, operates year-round at two historic, beautifully conserved theaters: the Oriental (a majestic movie palace in operation since 1927) and the Downer (a modest picture house that’s the oldest continuously operating theater in Milwaukee). Between the two cinemas, 5 traditional theater-style auditoriums were all dedicated to festival screenings. Like other indie theaters across the nation, such as Music Box Theater in Chicago and The Plaza in Atlanta, these theaters’ charm comes from keeping their original design and adornments intact, and their cinematic legacies linger in the air.
While the overcast, chilly late Spring weather did not permit walking between the two, their proximity allows one to easily bounce back and forth between screenings. Notably, even on weekdays, there are a handful of matinee screenings, mainly attended by an older cinematically curious audience. Like any film festival or general movie-going outing, the crowd can make a big difference in the overall energy and experience. At the Milwaukee Film Festival, I’m surrounded by those who have silently agreed to show respect for the cinematic by staying through the credits, with the house lights kept down low.
When I spoke with Milwaukee Film Programming Director and fellow native Oak-Parker Kerstin Larson, she remarked on the expansive nature of the team’s vision: “Every programmer really has the freedom to decide the titles for their section, and our technical team is really strong with a passion for good exhibition practices.”
The 2026 lineup included 106 feature films and 138 shorts from around the world, across every genre. Although only a few repertory screenings are scheduled, including an annual showing of “Stop Making Sense,” their focus is on presenting newer films that reflect the city’s evolving, passionate cultural fabric and bringing fresh, diverse narratives to Milwaukee County.
My personal programming began on a Friday afternoon with French director Alice Dourd’s “Love Letters.” The familial rom-com is a midlife coming-of-age story about two women navigating motherhood and adoption in the early days of France’s legalization of same sex marriages. The two other features I saw, curated under the festival’s “Genre Queer” category, were documentaries about prolific women creatives. “Barbara Forever,” by director Byrdie O’Connor, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year, is an intimate look at the creative, erotic, curious life and mind of filmmaker Barbara Hammer. Pegged as a “poet of images,” Hammer was a pioneer of capturing sapphic intimacy on celluloid and experimenting with the materiality and exhibition ambitions.
Similar to many independent theaters, Milwaukee Film thrives on its regular patrons and members. During the festival, members are celebrated at a super secret mystery screening. Hosted in the main, most spectacular theater at the Oriental, which seats over 1,000 guests, the 4 pm screening was a full house of dedicated movie lovers, anxious to know what was in store. To my absolute delight, we were graced with “Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World.” As only the second-ever audience to see the film, after its premiere at True/False in March, I am moved by its soft nature that mirrors Oliver’s practice and mind.
Regional film festivals are vital in providing opportunities to locally grown talent. To better ground myself in the scene, I attended a journalism and documentary panel focused on music. In discussing the different media and how they manifest in unique ways to accommodate both industries, it was interesting to hear the presenters touch on the similarities in the current struggles and solutions for distribution strategy in both film and music. Curious to see and hear more from local musicians, I also attended the Milwaukee Music Video Show, where over 15 local musicians showcased their music videos on the big screen. Spanning all genres, the synchronicities of different motifs and cinematic inspirations were woven into each story, showing us that creativity can be complex but unifying.
Another testament to the strength of the stories featured in the festival is that it draws from festivals all over and does not concern itself with the politics of premieres. Interestingly, and to my semi-biased benefit, there is a significant amount of shared titles between the Milwaukee Film Festival and the 2026 Chicago Critics Film Festival, which speaks to the similar tastes of regional film festivals and their role in the ecosystem in creating opportunities for independent filmmakers to reach audiences in markets they might not otherwise have access to. Some of the movies were so outstanding that I cannot wait to see them again. In particular, a couple of pictures from the Black Lens program were so powerful that I feel compelled to whip out the overused superlative “favorite film of the year” (so far).
On a Sunday morning, I sat in my preferred area of the cinema (up close and personal) at one of the smaller theaters at the Oriental and sobbed silently at the heartbreak and healing evoked by writer-director Walter Thompson-Hernández’s “If I Go Will They Miss Me.” The magical, mythological father-son story seared itself onto my heart. Its sun-soaked warmth, set in the housing projects beneath LAX’s flight path, is so dreamlike, and I’m struck by its ability to balance a mature yet innocent perspective on childhood and parenthood.
Director Maya Annik Bedward also unearths the intricacies of Black spirituality and selfhood through her spectacular documentary, “Black Zombie.” Tracing the origins of zombies from sugar cane fields in Haiti to novels by extractive anthropologists to adaptations by Hollywood’s horror filmmakers, it tenderly wraps a harsh history in honest, passionate accounts from knowledgeable university researchers and Haitian Voudou practitioners, pointing out seemingly subliminal messaging.
While playing my own balancing act between narrative and documentary features, I enjoyed other movies like Gregg Araki’s new movie, “I Want Your Sex,” and Milwaukee native Dasha Kelly’s “Makin’ Cake.” However, to my surprise, documentaries dominated my overall experience; titles like “Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild]” and “Paint Me A Road Out of Here” spotlighted institutional inequities in the archiving, preservation, and access to cultural artifacts and ancestral belongings.
In its 18th year, and only its 6th year taking place in the Spring, the festival is finding comfort in a different spot on the calendar. Reflecting on my time there, I remain quite taken and impressed by Milwaukee as a city and its movie-going scene, as its cultural confidence is only just beginning to reach new crowds. The festival has instilled a desire to return throughout the year to visit other essential Milwaukee-based institutions, such as the recently reopened American Black Holocaust Museum (which co-presented Makin’ Cake), The Rave music venue, and, most importantly, to enjoy more of Milwaukee Film’s programming.
- Short Films in Focus: Sound and Color (with Director Emma Foley) (May 5, 2026)
(Trigger warning: This film deals with suicide.)
Emma Foley’s “Sound and Colour” presents an awkward and unnerving first fifteen minutes of a woman, Hannah (Alison Oliver), coming home to her family after spending days at a hospital following a failed suicide attempt. No one, including her, knows quite what to say, but everyone (including her parents and two brothers) tries their best to put on a brave and polite face. It is her mother, Gill (Charlotte Bradley), who keeps asking questions and commenting on how pale Hannah looks now that she’s a vegetarian.
What happened? Was it her break-up with her boyfriend, Johnny (Aidan Moriarty)? Is it her new health regimen that made her chemically imbalanced, and therefore suicidal? Her mom wants a clean answer without actually talking about it. Hannah can see right through everyone, while also keeping her guard up, not letting them in on the how or why of it all. There is a time and place, of course, for such delicate conversations, but it ultimately falls on Hannah to decide when and where that will be.
Foley’s film takes place entirely in this confined house, lit with such warmth that you immediately sense a family has lived there for decades. The performances, likewise, are naturally familial, making the tragedy that much more potent and the final moments that much more devastating. We don’t know this family very well, but we sense we’re eavesdropping on an evening that will change these people’s lives forever, in ways they cannot yet imagine.
As Hannah, Oliver masterfully conveys the inner turmoil as she approaches each character who comes near her. She hides as much as she reveals. All the family wants to do is welcome her, eat burgers, and pretend everything is back to square one, but Hannah is nowhere near them. She is also not completely shunning them, either. Oliver makes Hannah a character we want to know more about while also conveying the deepest, darkest depths of her soul, yet keeping enough inside. We come away not completely understanding her (it is a short, after all), but not feeling alienated from her either. Bradley is as strong as her mother, conveying all the heartbreak of any parent who cannot imagine their kids being this deeply troubled or unhappy.
“Sound and Colour” is a deeply emotional piece that also has moments of levity. Foley crafts a tight fifteen minutes that earns the movie’s tearful climax. We walk away from it wanting to hug our loved ones a little tighter, while asking them, “Is everything okay?”
Q&A with writer-director Emma Foley
How did this project come about?
During lockdown, Tamryn (producer) and I decided to motivate each other to stay creative so we would write new ideas and share with one another each week. I eventually wrote the idea for “Sound & Colour” and she saw something in it. It’s very much personally and culturally inspired by the juxtaposition of Irish repression and humor. I grew up around such joy and laughter, but also a lot of depression, so I tried to condense my experiences into this piece.
I have never watched “Conversations With Friends,” but I feel I should after watching Alison Oliver in this. How did she become involved in this project?
I would watch everything she’s done; she’s magnificent. I don’t think there’s anything she can’t do, and she will never be put into a box. She has the strongest emotional range and a never-ending depth of understanding for human behavior. I had done a small project with Ali, and I just fell in love with her. When I was casting this, “Conversations” had come out, and she had shot “Saltburn,” so, thinking there was no chance, I wasn’t going to ask her. Then I bumped into her at a festival, her hair was dyed blonde, roots growing out after “Saltburn,” and she was just this character. I sent it to her the next day, and she said yes, so I am very lucky.
Likewise, Charlotte Bradley is a memorable presence in everything she’s been in. How did you get her for the film?
I had loved Charlotte’s work, but I didn’t know her or have a connection, so we went the old-fashioned way with an email to her agent along with the script, and, miraculously, she said yes. It was very nerve-wracking on the first day of filming with her because we all admired her so much, but she was a complete team player and invested in the character. It was a treat to have someone of her caliber engage with the material as she did.
Director Emma Foley.
The film deals with such a sensitive topic, but it ultimately feels satisfying by its conclusion. What were the challenges of writing it?
Cutting it down to a reasonable length! It was much longer, too long, but I just loved the world and the characters so much that I was always sad about cutting them down. But, as is always the case, it made the film much stronger. The tone was something I was very conscious of and wanted to get right because it is a sensitive topic, but I have had enough experiences in life to know that when bad or difficult things happen, the world doesn’t stop or become completely somber and quiet. It often gets loud and ridiculous. Some of the best laughs I’ve had are at a funeral or in a hospital. It’s how we survive. I wanted to capture that.
The interior and exterior scenes each have the same warm feeling, which feels at odds with what Hannah is going through. It almost feels like an extra, subconscious hurdle for that character. How did you and your cinematographer, Colm Hogan, go about designing the look of this film?
It’s so difficult to be in a dark place, feeling completely isolated and alone, yet be surrounded by life and people. Ultimately, as much as her family drives her crazy and can’t face the truth of what’s happened, it is they who save her. It’s they that force her to return to reality and not get completely consumed in her own thoughts.
I loved developing the look of the film. I had been a big fan of Colm’s work with the director Brendan Canty. Colm shoots very organically and naturalistically, which I think comes from his background in documentaries. I wanted to build on his language and make the audience feel like they’re inside Hannah’s experience.
I knew I wanted to shoot it as freely as possible, for it to feel unpredictable and non-prescribed. Always following the action and not predicting it. All of the camera work in the house was decided after we blocked with the actors. Colm would then set himself up to cover the scene once he got a sense of the actors’ movements and motivations. I knew I wanted that opening zoom-out shot and to bookend the film with a zoom-in, but beyond that, nothing was planned.
We spoke more about the rhythm and tone than about mapping out exact shots. A big goal was to make the film feel as natural and fluid as possible. I did a day of improvised rehearsals with the actors to help them get comfortable speaking over one another, interrupting, and being like family, which informed how we moved the camera.
What’s next for you?
“Sound & Colour” really made me fall in love with writing, so that’s what I spend most of my time doing or learning to do. I have a feature film in development at the moment, which sits in a similar world and tone to this. We’re hoping to make it soon.
- “The Chestnut Man: Hide and Seek” is a Serviceably Grim Nordic Noir Thriller (May 4, 2026)
No one does a dark and grisly murder like the Scandinavians. The steadily rising popularity of Nordic noir is a testament to this fact, as viewers of all stripes continue to embrace the twisty, chilly subgenre, known for its flawed protagonists, moody visuals, bleak subject matter, and slow-burn approach to storytelling. Usually quite a bit darker than your average crime thriller, these stories often feature familiar plot beats garnished with unflinching violence and complex supporting characters. Netflix’s “The Chestnut Man” is one of the better recent examples of this phenomenon, a Danish thriller from 2021 that follows the investigation into a string of serial murders, all marked by the inclusion of a disturbing chestnut figurine alongside various mutilated dead bodies.
Now, five years later, Netflix is returning to the Nordic noir well with “The Chestnut Man: Hide and Seek”. A standalone sequel that’s based on another book by author Søren Sveistrup, who is probably best known as the creator of the internationally acclaimed drama “The Killing,” it’s a follow-up that ticks many of the same narrative boxes that made its predecessor so successful, and even cribs its name for some added brand awareness. Technically, viewers don’t even need to have seen the original to enjoy this installment. (Though, of course, it’s nice if you have.)
Kastjanemanden. (L to R) Danica Curcic as Naia Thulin, Mikkel Boe Følsgaard as Mark Hess in Kastanjemanden. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024
The six-episode sequel re-teams the unorthodox pair of seasoned Copenhagen detective Naia Thulin (Danica Curcic) and Europol interloper Mark Hess (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard) for a completely new investigation. The pair’s pre-existing emotional connection is the show’s only real link to its predecessor, but “Hide and Seek” adds some new context by confirming that the two attempted a romantic relationship in the unseen multi-year gap between the two seasons, and their subsequent (also offscreen) break-up has left plenty of unresolved tension between them.
“Hide and Seek” begins in 1992, as a brief prologue follows a busload of schoolchildren on a nature field trip who discover a dead body in the marshlands. The show is not subtle at all about the fact that this case will somehow play into the season’s larger mystery; the first of several formulaic elements pops up throughout its episodes. In present-day Copenhagen, Thulin and Hess are thrown back together to solve a case involving a woman named Zara Solack (Elisha Lack) who is found murdered after being stalked and harassed by a mysterious figure who sent her creepy texts containing lyrics from a nursery rhyme-esque song about counting, with some grossly misogynistic bits thrown in for good measure. But when it turns out that Zara isn’t the only person who has received such texts, Thulin and Hess will have to find a way to work together again to find and thwart a killer.
Elsewhere, grieving mother Marie Holst (Sofie Gråbøl) is still struggling to come to terms with the loss of her daughter, Emma, more than two years after her disappearance and death. Determined to get justice for her murder, she’s still digging into the past: Going through Emma’s laptop, reconnecting with her friends, and grilling an ex for any details her daughter might have kept from her back then about her personal life.
No one who has seen the original “The Chestnut Man” (or pretty much any related show in this genre) will be surprised when evidence ultimately suggests Emma’s cold case and the ongoing present-day murders are connected in some way, but creators Dorte W. Høgh and Emilie Lebech Kaae manage to weave the two seemingly disparate plots together in a surprisingly satisfying way. (And that’s much less clunky than the series’s later callbacks to its opening murder.)
[Show Name]. (L to R) [Actor] as [Character], [Actor] as [Character] in [Show Name]. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024
As a framing device, the obnoxious counting rhyme doesn’t offer quite as compelling or creepy a hook as the disturbing chestnut figurines that littered the show’s first season. (Whether this is because the song is intangible or really just kind of bad is a judgment best left to the viewer’s discretion.) Nothing about “Hide and Seek’s” central mystery feels particularly groundbreaking in its delivery or story, and there are moments when its slow-burn narrative style can feel especially ponderous. But for those who enjoy the Nordic noir genre’s familiar themes and plot beats, this is a strong example of many of its strengths.
The series is incredibly atmospheric, boasting moody visuals, muted colors, and a generally claustrophobic feel. It’s definitely not a drama for the faint of heart—there’s lots of violence, death, and some fairly grisly kills—but it’s tense and tastefully shot. It wrestles with frequently difficult subject matter without sensationalizing its worst elements. And there are several major surprises, including a dramatic mid-season twist that completely (and unexpectedly) reshapes much of the story, and a final reveal that is less overtly telegraphed than the conclusion of its predecessor.
Thulin and Hess’s partnership remains compelling despite their interpersonal problems, and the chemistry between Curcic and Følsgaard powers much of the season’s first episodes, particularly as the still-disparate pieces of the show’s larger mystery come into focus around them. Fans who watched the original “The Chestnut Man” may find themselves annoyed that the franchise essentially skipped over the primary beats of the pair’s romantic relationship, but their unresolved personal issues loom large over much of their investigation.
Kastjanemanden. (L to R) Danica Curcic as Naia Thulin in Kastanjemanden. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024
Curcic makes for a smart and capable lead, but Følsgaard gets stuck with the decidedly unenviable job of trying to make Hess’s commitment issues seem interesting, a task at which he does not always succeed. (Hess apparently just left the country and ghosted Naia after dating for six months? Boo this man.) Among the supporting cast, Gråbøl is a standout as the grieving Marie, torn between her desire for justice and her need to be present for her surviving children. Ester Birch is also excellent as Thulin’s now considerably older daughter, Le, who is resentful about Hess’s abandonment of her and her mother.
At the end of the day, “The Chestnut Man: Hide and Seek” isn’t exactly a series that’s reinventing the wheel in the world of crime dramas. But, in many ways, its formulaic nature is part of its appeal, and its solid execution makes for an enjoyable enough ride. (Once you get the counting rhyme out of your head, at least.)
All six episodes screened for review. Premieres May 7 on Netflix.
- The Unloved, Part 149: Oh… Rosalinda!! (May 1, 2026)
Not even Martin Scorsese loves “Oh… Rosalinda!!” That’s the territory we’re treading with this month’s Unloved. I’ve heard arguments that all of Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger’s ’50s work lacks the charm that made them beloved figures of then-contemporary cinema and cult figures in the decades that followed, but I’ve never believed it.
Like George A. Romero before me, I see the later works of The Archers, for that was how they were known collectively, as being dabbed with a cologne of their distilled essence. So light, so sweet, so breathtakingly singular in its loveliness. Say what thou wilt about Rosalinda, but no one else on earth could have made it, and though there’s nothing critics love more than putting a new comedy right back in the box for store credit, I find all of the late Powell movies terrific (well… maybe not his Australian movies).
The peculiarity begins with its title, though it was also known by the name of the comic opera on which it’s based, Die Fledermaus, no help from obscurity. Two different sets of punctuation is a great way to make sure no one bothers learning the proper order of them, or indeed how best to pronounce the title.
David Cairns, friend and hero: “A ballet/operetta movie based on “Die Fledermaus” but updated to four powers Vienna, with the Bat, played by Anton Walbrook, functioning as a black marketeer and general fixer — a singing Harry Lime, if you will — this movie could actually qualify as the weirdest thing the Archers ever attempted. And it’s generally regarded as a complete failure…. “
Here he describes seeing the film in the company of editor Thelma Schoonmaker, the late Powell’s husband, and cinematographer Christopher Challis:
“Thelma took the stage and told us that when Scorsese and Powell first started spending time together, Scorsese would look through Powell’s collection of memorabilia, and every now and then would find a lobby card or image from “Oh… Rosalinda!!” Anton Walbrook dressed as a bat… “‘What’s this?’ he’d ask, and Michael would look abashed and hide the image and say, ‘Oh, nothing, nothing…’”
Not even the Archers themselves seemed to have been proud of it, but as David points out the film is part of a trilogy of whizzbang theatrical pictures, in which opera and reality fuse like watercolors on canvas. “Rosalinda” may be the featherweight, “Hoffmann” the heavy, and both sit on the fulcrum that is “The Red Shoes,” about which it could be said is the greatest movie of all time without ruffling too many feathers, but to be in that company is no joke. Every time I watch “Rosalinda,” I expect to see it fizzle the way so many before me have, but I’m riveted each time. Do with that what thou wilt.
