A good tasty noir, like “Love Lies Bleeding,” always feels contemporary, even if set in the past; that’s because it should feel as urgent as the love-and-death stakes it’s about. “Killer Heat,” on the other hand, while not quite so old-fashioned that it creaks, definitely plays like a mirage of detective noirs you’ve seen before. To start with: Could there be a worse title? It makes the movie sound like some straight-to-tape potboiler from the ’80s starring Jim Belushi and Daphne Zuniga. “Killer Heat” opens with the voice of its star, Joseph Gordon-Levitt (who has a way of sounding like Keanu Reeves’ brainier brother), delivering one of those logy “hardboiled” philosophical nuggets to the audience (“The Icarus myth was set on the island of Crete. And apparently no one there had learned much from his story…”).
But just as you’re ready to nod out, Gordon-Levitt, as a private investigator named Nick Bali in a hipster island fedora, meets Shailene Woodley, as the wealthy trapped wife of a shipping-company CEO based in Crete. Her husband’s brother has plunged to his death during a free-solo climb up a vertical rockface. But it’s clear to her that foul play was involved. Woodley has a special version of the X Factor — not mere charisma (though she’s got that too) but the ability to draw you right to the center of her concerns. (I thought the critics missed how powerfully she had that in “Ferrari,” despite her slippery Italian accent.) Her character, Penelope Vardakis (no accent this time), has summoned Nick to investigate the case, but he’s got to be totally down-low about it, because the Vardakis family controls the police force and reigns over more or less everyone else on the island.
The first thing we learn is that the husband, Elias, and his late brother, Leo, were identical twins. They’re both played by the Scottish actor Richard Madden, who is handsome in such a standard Ryan Seacrest way that it takes you a moment to realize that he can truly act. Mostly, he plays Elias, who runs the island through violence and extortion and acts like it; his feathers are easily ruffled. But then, in flashback, Madden plays the much nicer Leo, who was the first of the two brothers to fall for Penelope. They met at Oxford, where we watch the two became involved. Then Elias shows up and does something dastardly and interesting: Through a surreptitious text message, he arranges for Leo to have a study date with Penelope, then shows up at her room as if he was Leo. Shades of David Cronenberg’s 1988 “Dead Ringers” (in which Jeremy Irons played kinky identical-twin gynecologists).
The bedroom scene between Penelope and Elias-as-Leo is effective (you could almost say it has killer heat), to the point that I wish the film had gone further in that direction: more underhanded impersonation, more of the two brothers set against each other. But we soon return to the present day, where “Killer Heat” is just a murderous love triangle, though the legs of the triangle do get rearranged a bit. Were Penelope and Leo having an affair? And how did the murder of Leo happen? These are some of the standard things that Nick, teaming up with a local cop (Babou Ceesay), gets to the bottom of.
“Killer Heat” is based on “The Jealousy Man,” a short story by the hugely popular Norwegian crime novelist Jo Nesbø, and whatever intrigue it had on the page has been largely tamped down by the movie, in which the unraveling of twists feels more like the connecting of dots. The director, Philippe Lacôte, does an okay job of unfurling the story, yet somehow it all lacks…heat. Maybe that’s because he wants the dots he’s connecting to be sentimental. Nick keeps finishing off whiskey bottles, because he’s drowning his sorrow over the family he lost. His wife, Monique (Abbey Lee), was having an affair, so the film’s theme of murderous jealousy reverberates through his own story. But the way this is resolved, it’s all a trifle too neat: a film noir that ends with a feel-good whitewash.
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