Neuro-Noir

The Dali dreamscapes of Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, the asylum as microcosm of the midcentury United States in Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor, the murder investigation leading to the heart of buried trauma in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island… The films we’ve classified as Neuro Noir find the inky shadow of film noir masking the unknown and unknowable corners of the mind, bringing together titles released during the genre’s postwar heyday to more nearly contemporary times. There are hard-boiled tough guys and femme fatales aplenty to be found here, but these works of “Was it all just a dream?” uncertainty, asphyxiating nightmare logic, and temporally fractured structuring very often propose that we are our own worst enemies.