Vincent (Schoenaerts) is a PSTD-afflicted former special forces who, during a cash-in-hand nixer as a security guard, takes a shine to Jessie (Kruger), the trophy wife he is assigned to protect.
On a routine trip to the beach with his charge, a shaky and self-medicated Vincent overreacts when he spies a car that may or may not be tailing Jessie and her young son. As it happens, he’s not just being paranoid: when Jessie’s insanely wealthy Lebanese husband fails to return from a business trip, she’s left high and dry with only Vincent to protect her.
A cleverly parsimonious screenplay by Jean-Stephane Bronand and Winocour’s sly direction gives us clues, not exposition, regarding the characters: Vincent’s briefly glimpsed bedroom in his mother’s house speaks of a man-child who went straight from schoolboy to soldier; the documents in the refrigerator suggest that Jessie is both cognisant and collaborative in her husband’s “interests”, her sudden abandonment underscores that arm-candy wives are just that. She switches off a news report about the powerlessness of women in Islamic State territories with a swiftness that registers uncomfortable parallels and, possibly, guilt.
There are flourishes of brilliance throughout Winicour's second feature: squint just right at certain moments and Disorder is characterised by Hitchcockian obsession and coloured by Buñuelian class politics. The action and home-invasion sequences, when they come, are brilliantly choreographed.
Disorder's minimalism, however, while steering the film commendably clear of big speeches and bigger explanations, conversely, leaves the viewer with a great deal of nothingness.
The downtime is just long enough for one to ponder such plot holes as: why on earth didn’t they leave town before now? Where did the police go?
Kruger does enough to suggest that Jessie is more than an expensive bauble, but this is very much a Matthias Schoenaerts picture. Having been hopelessly miscast in a series of rather poor English language pictures – A Little Chaos, Far From the Madding Crowd, Suite Francaise – Disorder’s soulful brute allows him to revisit the brooding and hulking of Bullhead and Rust and Bone. A welcome return to form.
