10 great heatwave films

Hopefully the UK has already experienced the highest temperatures it will see all year (just coming short of 35 degrees in parts of London at the start of July), but that doesn’t mean that the sweltering temperatures and heat-inflected discomfort are fully behind us. Heatwaves have a singular and powerful impact on us physically, mentally and spiritually: we feel tired, sluggish, irritable; we lather on suntan lotion and hold cold implements to our temples; we search online for the best placement of a tower fan to ensure science is on our side.

There are decades’ worth of heatwaves documented in cinema. Across the world, directors have used the heatwave as a metaphor for urban disaffection, abandonment and unrest. Outside of cities, blistering heat feels like nature’s violent reckoning with those too dependent on the comfort and structure of civilised society. But heatwaves also have a strong connection with the noir and dystopian genres – a natural, uncomfortable aberration in the environment that mirrors a character’s moral decline or degradation.

When you can’t bear the heat outside and would rather silo yourself away from the sun with plenty of ice-cold fluids and ventilation, heatwave films reflect your experience back at you with drama, artistry and surreality to alleviate the discomfort. Here are 10 to put on when the mercury is rising.

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa’s kidnap thriller High and Low (1963) is getting a boost in popularity this year thanks to Spike Lee’s reimagined version, but this earlier crime film is every bit its equal among Kurosawa’s present-day dramas. Stray Dog follows a headstrong young cop (Toshiro Mifune) who loses his Colt service pistol and must doggedly retrace his steps through sweltering Tokyo neighbourhoods, along with an experienced detective and family man (Takashi Shimura), to avoid disgracing himself in the eyes of authority. 

As with many Kurosawa films, Stray Dog looks at a stratified Japanese society filled with moral contradictions and bubbling tensions. The immediate post-war period is rife with paranoia and poverty, and Kurosawa’s noir inflections and the story’s intense heat add shadows and sweat to the mix. The heatwave amplifies our young detective’s distress, while also representing the difficult society-wide conditions that everyone suffers jointly.

Director: Ted Kotcheff

The first of two Australian films on this list, Wake in Fright is a provocative and controversial tale of John Grant (Gary Bond), an upstanding schoolteacher falling apart when he’s stranded in an outback town. He’s penniless, bothered by eccentric locals, and tempted by base, self-destructive impulses that he may only be able to repress within the boundaries of polite modern society. 

Surviving on beer, kangaroo meat and aggressive, homoerotic companionship (with an outcast doctor played by Donald Pleasence), John’s submission to the heat of Australia’s colonised outback either rewrites his sociological DNA or reveals his hidden barbaric id – regardless, the inescapable sun has an oppressive, pollutive, skin-flaying quality that invites a lethargy and unravelling in the characters. Their decorum, self-care and ethics slip away from them like cumbersome layers that need to be shed on a hot day.

Director: Sidney Lumet

The heat has everybody acting up in Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, the quintessential American bank heist picture. Sonny (Al Pacino) and Sal (John Cazale) are the twitchy, overactive young men robbing a Brooklyn bank in the hot ‘dog days’ of summer so Sonny can fund his transgender partner’s gender-affirming surgery. A monument to the ethos of New York’s Actors Studio, Dog Day Afternoon is full of livewire, restless performances, with Pacino’s Sonny – after taking hostages and becoming a flash-in-the-pan countercultural figure on Brooklyn’s streets – displaying constant anxiety about his dubious authority. 

Throughout the film, shirts are stained with sweat, hair becomes bedraggled, and the waning hours of the day take a heavy toll on the two robbers trying to force their will on a hostile world. Lumet’s best film depicts the drastic measures that feel downright sensible in bad heat.

Director: Lawrence Kasdan

Lawrence Kasdan’s homage to the sordid, bitter romances of classic noir (specifically the husband-killing plot of 1944’s Double Indemnity) has an intoxicating, sensual south Florida heat coursing through it. William Hurt plays Ned Racine, a borderline incompetent lawyer coaxed into an all-consuming affair with the femme fatale Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner) who harbours a desire to kill her neglectful husband and share his vast wealth between them. 

Body Heat’s noirish power lies in its copious shots of glistening backs, shirts torn from sweaty torsos, and illicit meetings at boathouses and boardwalks. It’s a crime film about the foggy headrush of aggression and desire prompted by the sultry comfort of constant heat. Ned is equal parts devoted and gormless, while Matty (the role that kicked off an incredible run for Turner) has a presence and eroticism that conceals ruthless calculation.

Director: Phillip Noyce

In 1975 Australia, an urban conservationist named Juanita Nielsen disappeared from a nightclub in Kings Cross, Sydney, never to be seen again. Nielsen opposed new development plans on Sydney’s Victoria Street and, although her body was never recovered, the jury in a coronial inquest determined she died close to the time of her disappearance. 

This true story is the inspiration for Phillip Noyce’s Heatwave, a simmering modern thriller in the vein of Chinatown (1974), where a Christmastime heatwave is the backdrop for a corporate conspiracy that is gradually uncovered by a jaded architect (Richard Moir) and a local tenant activist (Judy Davis). The heat in Heatwave is naturalised; it belongs in every home, meeting and function, as uncomfortable and inevitable as the wall of crony capitalism pressing down on tired working-class residents. Noyce has referred to Heatwave as belonging to a different, more inquisitive era of Australian filmmaking, but its themes of corruption and unlawful development have only become more pertinent since.

Director: Spike Lee

Spike Lee’s dynamite ensemble film is so memorable as a depiction of an inner-city heatwave that he was tempted to revisit the setting for two further films: the 70s-set New York dramas Crooklyn (1994) and Summer of Sam (1999) – the latter of which was set in the Bronx rather than Lee’s familiar Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. No film on this list feels more like a powder keg: the plot sees a young pizza delivery employee, Mookie (Lee), who is loyal to his older employer Sal (an Academy Award-nominated Danny Aiello) but bears witness to the vehement anti-Black racism of Sal’s sons. Meanwhile, escalating police brutality in the neighbourhood threatens to tear their pocket of Bed-Stuy apart. 

Peppered with keenly-observed snapshots of urban heat (an erotic use of ice cubes being the most memorable), Do the Right Thing uses its soaring temperatures to incense and motivate its characters to snap back against structural injustice.

Director: Stephen Hopkins

To match the jungle conditions of John McTiernan’s original Predator (1987), this 1990 sequel offered us a dystopic, slightly futuristic Los Angeles going through a searing heatwave while caught up in a violent war between criminal gangs and a militarised police force. Enter the Predator on its legendary hunt, nimbly and deftly navigating the city with no loss of cognition or agility – which puts the human cast (including Danny Glover, Gary Busey, María Conchita Alonso and Bill Paxton) at a distinct disadvantage. 

Director Stephen Hopkins’ sequel, now 35 years old, has been moderately reclaimed as an underrated slice of pulp. While it hasn’t fully shaken its reputation as a junky imitator of McTiernan’s taut craft, its merits as a deranged and untempered heatwave action film can’t be overlooked, making a visceral impression with its immersive and tactile sound design and its sea of faces turned into reflective surfaces by sweat.

Director: Jane Campion

Jane Campion’s psychological thriller eschews a clearly structured plot for a hazy, disquieting portrait of rampant and alienating desire. It doesn’t explicitly name a heatwave in its summertime New York story, but still feels appropriately stifling and disorientating. Meg Ryan plays Frannie, an English teacher living in New York while a mutilating, misogynist serial killer runs rampant. An intense sexual affair with a crass and suspicious detective (Mark Ruffalo) sets the tone of paranoid self-discovery and vulnerability. 

In Campion’s film, the image is blurred and imbued with yellow-green hues and the camera freely cuts from high to low angles – it is a decentred erotic thriller. In the Cut was shot in New York the first summer after 9/11, and the city’s atmosphere has affected everyone’s nervous system. Desire has been hijacked by aggression, and voyeurism is as fearful as it is satisfying.

Director: Richard Kelly

Richard Kelly’s initially maligned follow-up to Donnie Darko (2001) is a dystopic view of America’s near future born from the Bush era. It’s so full of cultural and political predictions that it gives The Simpsons a run for its money. But even the great seer Nostradamus couldn’t predict Justin Timberlake reading from The Book of Revelations, which is actually one of the more normal things to feature in a film about a fractured America united in self-destructive post-9/11 anxiety. 

During a future fourth of July heatwave, the nuclear and technocratic ambitions of the United States come to a head. An amnesiac movie star and an adult film actress blackmail a Republican into relaxing draconian surveillance legislation, and neo-Marxists are on the verge of overrunning a panicked Los Angeles. Southland Tales is a delirious film that perfectly complements the sensation of fighting off the worst symptoms of heat exhaustion.

Director: Lee Daniels

Lee Daniels preceded his stately Obama-core drama The Butler (2013) with a seedy, ugly Florida noir following two brothers, Ward (Matthew McConaughey) and Jack (Zac Efron), partnering with English reporter Yardley (David Oyelowo) to investigate the wrongful conviction of an alligator hunter (John Cusack) imprisoned for murdering a local sheriff. Jack has to vie for the affection of local woman Charlotte (Nicole Kidman), whose devotion to the imprisoned man leads the brothers down treacherous paths (and swamp canals) as the answers to their investigation becomes more and more irrelevant. 

Set in 1969, Daniels’ film depicts Florida’s volatile racial tensions with clumsy conviction, and the many drawling accents and sudden bursts of eroticism and violence contribute to a hazy but charged mood that dominates the mystery plotting. The Paperboy leaves you with the feeling that, like many unanswered incidents tucked away in American history, the only thing that will linger in our memory will be the heat, the passion and the pain.