Film / Reviews
Review: Disorder
Disorder (15)
France/Belgium 2015 98 mins Dir: Alice Winocour Starring: Matthias Schoenaerts, Diane Kruger, Zaïd Errougui-Demonsant, Percy Kemp
A daft-yet-stylish French thriller that plays Tinseltown at its own game? Paging M. Besson. But wait – who’s this? Why, it’s Alice Winocour, whose award-winning costume drama feature debut Augustine wasn’t shown in UK cinemas. Disorder suffers no such ignominy, receiving a wide arthouse and modest multiplex release. That’s thanks mainly to the casting of versatile, increasingly ubiquitous Matthias Schoenaerts (Far from the Madding Crowd, The Danish Girl, A Bigger Splash, etc), to whose name it is now a legal requirement to append the epithet ‘hunky’, in what might be described as the Liam Neeson role.
Winocour establishes the set-up briskly enough. Heavily tattooed Vincent (Schoenaerts) is a French Special Forces soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after serving a tour of duty in Afghanistan. Fearing his condition will mean the end of his military career, he takes a temporary security job with a bunch of army buddies. Their task is to provide muscle at a party held in a Lebanese businessman’s sprawling mansion. His PTSD manifesting in tinnitus and a mild case of the shakes, taciturn Vincent has something of a short fuse. But when his employer departs abruptly the following morning, he’s asked to stay on to watch over the man’s sad trophy wife (Kruger) and tousle-haired moppet (Errougui-Demonsant) in their gilded cage.
Winocour toys briefly with the notion that Vincent’s PTSD-driven paranoia is conjuring threats from nowhere when he chauffeurs his charges to the beach. But the audience for a thriller of this nature would clearly feel cheated if that proved to be the case. So it’s not long before hordes of armed goons are doing the full-on home invasion thing, making a horrible mess of the opulent location that the camera caressed so lovingly in those opening scenes. The half-baked explanation for all of this makes very little sense, but Winocour proves highly adept at building tension while keeping politics simmering on the back burner throughout. “It makes a change to be protecting Arabs,” smirks one of Vincent’s comrades pointedly.
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