A soldier with PTSD tries to keep a family safe in ‘Disorder’

A pill-popping ex-soldier with “chaos” tattooed on his arm has probably got himself a few problems. In a movie, he’s also likely to be asked to beat up bad guys to a bloody mess, efficiently and expertly.

That’s what happens in “Disorder,” a dark thriller about a troubled soldier-turned-bodyguard who takes a job to keep safe the well-heeled wife and child of a shady arms dealer.

The proper name for what leading man Matthias Schoenaerts suffers from is post-traumatic stress disorder, and there’s certainly no shortage of trauma and stress in director Alice Winocour’s well-paced, anxiety-filled thriller. There are hallucinations, breakdowns, visits to the psychiatrist, temper outbursts and brooding silences, all masterfully rendered by the bulky buzz-cut Schoenaerts, best known for roles in “Bullhead” and “The Danish Girl.”

Almost all of the movie takes place in the arms dealer’s upper-crust estate in the south of France, not a bad place to hang out — until the bad guys in black masks come calling.

The violence is sporadic, intense, messy and interspersed with long interludes of the banalities of the security guard business — swiveling surveillance cameras, alarm keypads, video monitors and annoying walkie-talkies. Director Alice Winocour lets the camera linger on portentous plastic bags blowing down the street, on things that bang in the wind, on suspicious folks in rearview mirrors and on the washing off of blood under a faucet. The violence jumps out when no one’s looking.

Schoenaerts has an unrequited crush on the arms dealer’s wife, played by Diane Kruger, who hasn’t had so much trouble figuring out what’s going on in a movie since she was reading all those secret codes on the back of the Declaration of Independence in “National Treasure.”

Schoenaerts — who was said to have slept only two hours a night during filming, to ramp up his stress level — is thoroughly watchable as the troubled Afghanistan veteran, good at his work, equipped with all sorts of high-tech gadgets but with absolutely no idea about who or what is threatening his slinky client. He takes in everything and knows nothing. Everyone is in the dark, but it’s a tense, high-strung darkness that doesn’t let up until Schoenaerts’ final, forlorn hallucination.

Disorder

Psychological thriller. Directed by Alice Winocour. Starring Matthias Schoenaerts and Diane Kruger. (R. 101 minutes)