The noir style was established in France in the 1930s as the more bitter current of what was termed Poetic Realism in the wake of the defeat of the Popular Front. It then emerged full-blown in the US during and after the Second World War as the dark style was utilised to mourn the beating back of the energy of organised labour and the emergence of the repressive forces of McCarthyism. At the same time the style spread across the world in indigenous moments in England, Italy and Japan where, in league with labour unrest, it was employed to lodge a critique of the corporate reshaping of the post-war world.

The most dominant and dynamic formations of the movement at the moment centre not around Hollywood productions but around three regional noir sites: Asia, Scandinavia and, the oldest of these, the Mediterranean. Asian noir, especially in its Chinese variant, has been employed to highlight the gap between official optimism about development and resentment over who is most clearly benefiting from that development in such films as Tian zhu ding/A Touch of Sin (dir. Zhangke, 2013), Ren shan ren hai/People Mountain, People Sea (dir. Shangjun, 2011), Bai ri yan huo/Black Coal, Thin Ice (dir. Yinan, 2014) and Da xiang xidi erzuo/An Elephant Sitting Still (dir. Bo, 2018). Scandinavian noir has often employed the dark style to expose the fissures in societies that have attempted to reconcile an egalitarian lifestyle with the capitalist imperative of profit (Smilla's Sense of Snow, August 1997; The Millennium Series, 2011–18; The Killing, DR1 2007–12). Mediterranean noir unearths and plays upon tensions resulting from longstanding inequality in the region. To explore these class tensions it is useful to employ Fernand Braudel's (1972) concept of how Mediterranean geography, centred around mountains and sea, influenced uneven development, but also provided the space for persistent pockets of resistance to entrenched power.

In the post-classical neo-noir period, which in its later phase is coterminous with the rise and dominance of neoliberalism, Mediterranean noir has often traced the history of this unsettling imposition of a more avaricious mode of capitalism on the region. Here the style captures the breakdown of longexisting communal patterns and their replacement by increasingly individualistic and desperate modes of relating.