Like waking up to find the sun is gone

I don’t remember the last time I saw a film and was this visibly shook and terrified to the very core by it’s end, considering I’ve just come from fresh first time viewings of Rififi and The Wages of Fear.

There’s really no other noir, and honestly, no other film I’ve ever seen like Kiss Me Deadly. It very much follows through with the usual cliches of the noir genre, e.g. private investigator getting roped into some big conspiracy, femme fatales, guns, distorted cinematography, but everything here is dialed up to 1000 in a way I’ve never seen done before. I can’t describe it, it’s so particular. Just from the first ten minutes alone, you know you’re about to see something different and for 1955 standards, this was probably the darkest film to have come out from American cinema. It is so, so originally unique that I couldn’t even make comparisons to anything else. Maybe there’s a few moments where you go, “ahhhhh, for sure that was an influence on Se7en or Raiders Of The Lost Ark”, but that’s about as far as it goes. There’s just such a strong looming sense throughout that something is off, and I mean that in a sense where you wake up one morning and you realize the sun is gone. A lot of haunting ambience too.

It’s not like any other noir like The Maltese Falcon where you sort of have a sense of what the conspiracy is slowly building towards. No, here, the mystery is relentlessly tight-lipped, and even by the end it still leaves so much up to the imagination. Felt very Lynchian. Wouldn’t be surprised if he loved this. Pure paranoia mixed with this existential, apocalyptic and almost sci-fi like dread.

A truly dark, bleak, nail-biting and unpredictable thriller of the highest magnitude where anything is possible. Where this film begins and where it ends, I still can’t even process the fact it’s still the same movie. The less you know beforehand, the better.