Disorder – Film Review by Pat V.

Director: Alice Winocour
Writers: Alice Winocour, Jean-Stéphane Bron
Stars: Matthias Schoenaerts, Diane Kruger, Paul Hamy

Disorder (aka Maryland) is French writer-director Alice Winocour’s tense new drama-thriller set among the haves and have-nots in the South of France. It offers a mesmeric performance by Matthias Schoenaerts who plays Vincent Loreau, a soldier struggling with PTSD who has recently returned from fighting in Afghanistan. His inability to shake off experiences on the battlefield leads to his suspension from duty, which in the opening scene of the film, he realises may well be permanent. To make ends meet he takes a job, working as a security expert at a lavish party thrown by a Lebanese businessman, Imad Whalid (Percy Kemp), at his heavily protected Riviera property, Maryland.

During the party Loreau is witness to a heated argument between Whalid and his business partners and some days later he is asked to return to the villa to act as live-in security for Jessie (Diane Kruger), Whalid’s wife and his young son, Ali during Whalid’s absence on a shady business trip. He soon becomes convinced that the two are in serious danger and director Alice Winocour raises the tension notch by notch by leaving us to speculate how much of this is reality and how much Loreau’s paranoia. The unsettling, pulsating soundtrack that parallels his mental “disorder” adds to this uncertainty and keeps us on the edge of our seats waiting for the inevitable denouement.

Schoenaerts’s performance as the taciturn, troubled Loreau is totally engaging. He is rarely off screen and resists the temptation to dramatise or overplay his part which he could so easily have done. He exudes a panther-like magnetism, equal parts sex and danger, and we completely believe the reluctance of his protégée, Jessie, to trust and finally care for him. Diane Kruger seems, at first, the spoiled, trophy wife and though not given a lot to do, she captures well Jessie’s disillusionment and anger when her world starts to fall apart and she realises the true nature of her husband’s profession and the danger to which he has exposed her and their child.

There is a lot of action and some violence in the latter part of this film but it is never gratuitous or overly graphic. The storyline has already been done (think of The Bodyguard or Man on Fire) but there is an authenticity in Winocour’s version that holds our attention throughout. There are some weaknesses in her story: we are never too clear as to why Jessie and her son are the focus of such determined vengeance on the part of their attackers or what exact role Whalid played in it all, but these are minor faults. Overall, Disorder is well-made, makes for compulsive watching and is worth going to for Schoenaerts’s magnetic performance alone.