Disorder

There’s a lot to be said for taking the indirect approach, for refusing to spell things out for a lazy audience. But this tact needs balance – feeding the viewer only snippets of what it needs to know to appreciate a scene, Alice Winocour (Augustine) keeps events too low key for her own good.

Soldier Vincent Loreau (Schoenaerts) is just back from a tour abroad and his finding it difficult to fall back into civilian life, a struggle hampered by post-traumatic stress disorder that gives him the shakes and auditory hallucinations. To earn extra cash in between tours, he’s hired as private security to Imad Whalid (Kemp), a businessman of international renown, although, and this is indicative of the problems in the script, what he does is kept frustratingly secret. When Whalid is forced abroad, Vincent moves into his lavish mansion to watch over wife Jessie (Kruger) and young son (Zaid Errougui-Demonsant). Time alone in the empty house creates an air of sexual tension but the threat of a terrorist attack looms …

Disorder is all backstory, something to fill in the blanks so an audience can understand characters’ actions better when events get down to business later. But there is no later - the entire film resembles a long first act building up to something that never comes to fruition. The story is too vague – who Jessie’s husband is and why terrorists are determined to kill/kidnap (again, it isn’t clear what they plan to do) his family remains a mystery; Vincent has an idea, which he throws at Jessie, but she doesn’t confirm or deny.

Winocour is in two minds what to do: explore Vincent’s PTSD and how it affects this particular job or get right into the sexual tension between him and Jessie á la The Bodyguard. It only half does both while flirting with, but not developing, Vincent as a father figure to the ignored boy. While Schoenaerts is given some tasty traits to play with, the less can be said about Kruger who is asked to be only cold and distant; when she and Vincent’s buddy (Hamy, belatedly drafted in to help secure the house) enjoy a laugh over a beer it’s totally out of character.

There just isn’t enough happening and sequences go on for too long the reason for their existence can be forgotten. A lengthy party scene with Vincent patrolling both the house and grounds teases and tugs but doesn’t go anywhere and, at one point, when he’s insulted by a rich businessman at the gate, the incensed Vincent hunts the partygoers to have it out with him but that too just dribbles away to nothing.

But Winocour excels in other areas. The action, when it does come by, is expertly handled and her use of music is quite different. Using music to highlight the rising panic in a character’s mind is a stale of film but Winocour attempts to play with that somewhat: because of his auditory hallucinations, the viewer is privy to sounds in his mind and if he moves his head, the soundtrack ‘wobbles’ with him.

An initially promising but ultimately undercooked drama/thriller, there is however enough here to suggest that Winocour will go on to do better things.