Disorder

After a relatively chatty turn in last month’s ‘A Bigger Splash’, Euro-hunk Matthias Schoenaerts gets back to what he does best – scowling silently with his top off – in this sleek, shiny, smart-ish thriller. He plays Vincent, a musclebound lug on forced leave from the French army following a psychiatric evaluation, who fills his time with bodyguard-for-hire gigs. Inevitably, his mission to protect trophy wife Diane Kruger and her young son goes south, and he ends up trapped in her mansion at the mercy of armed international assassins.

Playing essentially the same taciturn, scary-but-sympathetic thug as in his breakthrough film ‘Bullhead’, Schoenaerts is as coiled and magnetic as ever: he’s surely a shoo-in if the Bond producers ever decide to go Continental. And director Alice Winocour handles the tension flawlessly: there’s one shot of a masked figure lurking in a hallway that’ll make your skin prickle.

But overall, there’s just not enough going on in ‘Disorder’: largely plotless and set almost entirely in a single, bland location, it doesn’t have enough atmosphere to compensate for the lack of action. Schoenaerts works hard to keep us on our toes, but as his character becomes less ambiguous and more predictable, so does the film.