In this reasonably taut thriller - French with English subtitles - Matthias Schoenaerts plays Vincent, the tense soldier back from Afghanistan who resembles for all the world our own Liam Neeson in Taken mode. He matches the Ballymena man for eternal watchfulness and wakefulness, and in terms of clobbering people swiftly and mercilessly when he has to.
Indeed the words ‘animal magnetism’ spring lithely to mind. As though pointing knowingly at this very quality, the woman whom he is trying to physically defend in an isolated house tells him in a rare relaxed moment that he would like Canada. She tells him she could see him hunting bears by the lakes and then she laughs. He laughs too, but it is the only occasion in which he laughs in the entire movie.
A coiled spring, Vincent needs tranquillisers to banish the nightmares of battle that still haunt him. While waiting to be called back to Afghanistan - which seems unlikely - he works as a security guard. He is one of a team of armed SWAT types who are charged with protecting a wealthy Lebanese businessman, Irma Whalid (Percy Kemp), his wife Jesse (Diane Kruger) and their young son. The family live in a fabulous house and grounds - oddly called Maryland - at San-Jean-Cap-Ferrat in the South of France.
Matthias Schoenaerts - unrelenting tension, a coiled spring
Being naturally curious, Vincent eavesdrops on a rather intense conversation involving Whalid during a lavish party hosted by the businessman. Thus he is unwittingly drawn into a sinister web, as though courting more danger than he is being paid to entertain. He is drawn even more intimately into whatever skullduggery is going on when he is charged with looking after wife and son for a further 48 hours, while Whalid attends to a pressing matter abroad. Inevitably the baddies come a-knocking and make their presence felt.
Yes, you are riveted for sure, and intensely curious as to what is actually going on in the first place and curious too as to how matters will be resolved. But somehow the movie doesn’t deliver the killer climax it seems to be setting us up for. Schoenaerts – who recently distinguished himself in Luca Guadagnini’s mostly impressive A Bigger Splash – so dominates the movie that you expect something epic, some great crescendo to upturn everything.
Diane Kruger as Jesse, the wife who becomes unwitting victim of her husband's nefarious business dealings in Disorder
However, despite Winocour’s skill as director – she well knows how to ratchet up the tension - we never get the great showdown that seems promised. In fact the story kind of peters out, the final scene is a cop-out and, what’s more, the actual final frame is ludicrously trite. Pity, Disorder could have been so much better.
Paddy Kehoe
