Movies like Double Indemnity

Why it's similar — Mark Mylod's 2005 Alaskan-set Robin Williams comedy borrows the Double Indemnity skeleton — a man, an insurance policy, a corpse problem — and replays it as a black-comedy thriller in a snow-bound register. The rhyme is the script's understanding that insurance fraud is the noir form's deepest engine, and that the wronged-husband-and-his-claim is a setup that returns in every decade because the genre's basic moral question remains intact.

Why it's similar — Norman Jewison's 1968 Steve McQueen / Faye Dunaway picture works the same insurance-investigator-versus-elegant-criminal duet that Wilder and Chandler invented for Keyes and Phyllis — only here the investigator is a woman who also falls in love with the criminal she is pursuing. The rhyme is the genre's recurring fascination with the formal romance between investigator and target, and the tailored 1960s palette gives the moral economy a different gloss.

Why it's similar — George Gallo's 2020 Robert De Niro comedy works the same insurance-fraud premise from the producer's side rather than the salesman's — a film financier plots to kill an aging actor on set to claim the policy. The rhyme is the genre's recurring insistence that an insurance payout is the cleanest possible motive for a film murder, and that the policy itself is the document the plot must hide.

Why it's similar — Steven Spielberg's 2002 Frank Abagnale biopic shares Double Indemnity's most underrated structural element — the older institutional investigator (Hanks as Hanratty, here in the Keyes role) and the younger fraud (DiCaprio's Abagnale, in the Walter Neff role) — and stages the same eventual emotional dependence between hunter and hunted. The rhyme is the genre's recurring two-hander between an honest middle-aged investigator and a charming younger criminal who keeps confessing to him.

Why it's similar — Kenneth Branagh's 2007 Harold Pinter-scripted two-hander between Michael Caine and Jude Law works the same hermetic, dialogue-driven, two-person register that the parlour scenes of Double Indemnity made canonical — a battle of wits in a closed room, with the entire moral weight of the film resting on which of the two characters is lying more carefully. The rhyme is the use of language itself as the genre's central weapon.