You’ve been saying it all week, haven’t you? To everyone, every time you step out, in meetings, in voice notes. It’s hard to talk about anything else when it’s just so hot… 

As the UK and Europe reach record temperatures for June, everyone is reminded that Britain simply isn’t built for heat. It’s too hot to think, too hot to move. Every year it comes around and, though it never lasts long, for a few days you live almost primitively in your sweat, doing whatever it takes to get through it: fans, iced drinks, swimming pools, ponds, parks, cold showers, sleeping nude, going out in the clothes you can usually only wear on holiday. If you have air conditioning, lucky you – most of us are barely sleeping.

It’s stuffy outside and in, so you might as well put a film on. Here are seven of my favourite films that embody the desire and madness caused by heat. Sweat looks so much sexier when it’s on screen.

BODY HEAT (1981)

"My God, it's hot. I stepped out of the shower and started sweating again,” the film opens. Body Heat is a film that sweats profusely. It drips with it. Naked bodies glide over one another to John Barry’s sultry score in Lawrence Kasdan’s directorial debut – inspired by Billy Wilder’s 1944 classic noir Double Indemnity – a neo-noir erotic thriller set during a Floridian heatwave. The film stars William Hurt as a lawyer who falls madly in love with a femme fatale housewife played by Kathleen Turner, with whom he plots to kill her businessman husband. Like many of us this week, they promise not to talk about the heat, but it is impossible, it dominates, and is what ultimately drives them towards their fiery conclusion. Perfect viewing for a sticky night.

THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA (1964)

It was difficult choosing which Tennessee Williams adaptation to include – the father of sweltering psychosexual drama – but I ultimately settled on John Huston's The Night of the Iguana, not least for its sweaty close-ups of Richard Burton, shot by Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. Burton plays a defrocked Episcopalian priest turned troubled tour guide, and the film follows him as he leads a group of Baptist schoolteachers on a humid trip through Mexico before derailing them at a hotel in Puerto Vallarta run by a spirited innkeeper, and decides to stay.

‘One man… Three women… One night…’ the 60s poster reads, and Burton spends the film surviving sexual temptation from an all-star cast of women, including Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr and Sue Lyon. Elizabeth Taylor visited Burton on set, reportedly arriving in Mexico with seventy-four suitcases, where she is said to have jealously tried to run Gardner over with a drinks trolley.

LA CIÉNEGA (2001)

In Lucrecia Martel’s suffocating family drama, the languor of Argentina’s upper class is a swampy metaphor for decaying social values. Martel makes the muggy heat feel debilitating and catastrophic in this quiet narrative, inspired by her own family and shot in her hometown of Salta. The adults drink, the children roam wild, the pool is dirty; there are storms and Marian apparitions. The social order slowly decomposes; it is disturbing but beautiful. Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times that La Ciénaga ‘perspires from the screen’. Lucrecia Martel’s feature directorial debut is considered one of the greatest works of Argentinian cinema.

THE SWIMMER (1968)

How often have you wished you could simply swim home on a hot day? In The Swimmer, Burt Lancaster plays a jaded advertising executive who decides to swim through a string of manicured pools in his wealthy Connecticut neighbourhood, which he imagines as a kind of ‘river’, but his encounters with cocktail-sipping neighbours become increasingly strained. Based on a short story by John Cheever, the film is the third collaboration between director Frank Perry and his wife, screenwriter Eleanor Perry. Though it was a troubled production and not widely praised at the time, The Swimmer is now considered a classic, even a quintessential work of late-60s American cinema. Its dreamlike editing reflects a loss of control, a summer spiral into the suburban doom of America. As the film reaches its climax, you may no longer wish to dive into a pool anytime soon.

SWEPT AWAY (1974)

Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August is the full English title of Lina Wertmüller’s desert island anti-romance, more commonly known as Swept Away, and later remade by Guy Ritchie with Madonna and Adriano Giannini, the son of Wertmüller’s lead. On an elegant yacht cruising in the Mediterranean, wealthy Milanese socialite Raffaella, played by Mariangela Melato, torments Giancarlo Giannini’s Gennarino, a Communist deckhand. But their roles are reversed when the two find themselves stranded together on a deserted island, and the film descends into a slapstick, sun-scorched battle of the sexes.

As Wertmüller is wont to do, the film blends sex and politics with comedy to create a violent satire in beautiful colour. The film was shot in the province of Nuoro on the eastern Sardinian coast, and the characters bake in the heat as they become increasingly feral. Though Wertmüller was the first woman ever nominated for a Best Director Oscar, her humour is dirty and divisive, and as one might expect, the film descends into a sadomasochistic love affair. Please don’t, as I once inadvertently did, decide to watch it with your Dad.

CASA DE LAVA (1994)

In Casa de Lava’s scorched and surreal landscape, there are volcanoes, and houses built from their lava, wild dogs and zombie-like figures. Pedro Costa’s loose reworking of Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie reflects on Portugal’s colonial legacy, as the film follows a young nurse who accompanies a comatose construction worker back to his home in Cape Verde. The protagonist, Mariana, drifts into a community that does not seem to recognise the man she has brought, and a relentless, exhausting heat. Costa felt he became crazed on set – acting irrationally, getting lost on purpose, changing scenes after shooting, not following the script – and this delirium is felt when watching.

LOSING GROUND (1982)

Set over a hot East Coast summer, Kathleen Collins’ low-budget drama tells the story of Seret Scott’s Sara, a professor of philosophy working on a paper about ‘the ecstatic experience’ while trying to repair her marriage to Victor, a painter played by Ganja & Hess director Bill Gunn. The couple decide to rent a house in upstate New York, where their paths begin to diverge. Inspired by the quiet philosophical films of Éric Rohmer, Losing Ground was one of the first feature-length films directed by an African-American woman, and Collins’ only feature before her untimely death. Long unavailable, Losing Ground stands as a radiant and witty time capsule of 1980s Black artistic and intellectual culture in New York, a summer classic and a dareisay ‘ecstatic’ viewing experience.