Director: Alice Winocour
Cast. Matthias Schoenaerts, Diane Kruger
100min. Belgian/France. Thriller
Alice Winocour’s follow-up to Augustine is a mesmerising mood piece lushly set in the Southern French villa of its name, where Matthias Schoenaerts’ ex-soldier Vincent Loreau arrives to guard the wife of a shady Lebanese businessman. Fraught with tension and generating the kind of potent on screen chemistry experienced in cult classic Body Heat and Chinatown between its central characters, the enigmatic narrative is driven forward by a pounding atmospheric score involving no less than nine sound technicians.
Diane Kruger plays the stone-faced wife Jessie, who enjoys this luxury villa lifestyle with her tiny son Ali. But luxury comes at a price and it only emerges later that her wealthy husband is a crooked arms dealer, who gradually disappears leaving her prey to a continuous onslaught of hooded intruders, whom Schoenaerts sends packing. A tight and minimalist script is piqued with the odd dry comment, briefly lightening the suspenseful if rather schematic plotline, whose strength lies chiefly in a powerfully physical performance by Schoenaerts, who gradually brings a smile to Kruger’s tight-lipped Jessie, as their relationship deepens. DISORDER plays its secrets close to its musclebound chest as it unfurls towards an impressive but unsurprising finale. MT
NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | REVIEWED AT CANNES FILM FESTIVAL May 2015 | MARYLAND