Film noir, Padraic Killeen argues, is a cinema of missing persons. It is around this condition of missingness, gleaned from intervallic moments of inertia and irruption, passivity and passion, arrest and absorption, that this perceptive and philosophically probing study gracefully pivots. Through an eclectic and innovative montage of theories and films that effortlessly transcends the discursive constraints of genre, period and style, The Dark Interval presents a fresh and conceptually rich prism that brings out a paradoxically redemptive light from the shades of noir.