While he waits to be sent back to war, he and his army pals get jobs in a security detail, their first gig working a party at a mansion owned by a Lebanese businessman named Imad Whalid (Percy Kemp). Whalid lives there with his wife Jessie (Diane Kruger) and small son Ali (Zaïd Errougui-Demonsant). Television screens proliferate in every space, showing news anchors speculating about a growing political scandal involving international arms-dealing and French politicians that could topple governments and corporations. Vincent's just a soldier, albeit a highly trained one. He was sent to fight a war by those in power, the people at this very party. His health and his mind were wrecked for it, while those at home got to stay safe and oblivious. He has no say in how his country has used him, and then tossed him out. Vincent's sixth sense tells him that something is very wrong at that party, but he doesn't know what.

Hand-picked by Whalid to guard Jessie and Ali while Whalid goes out of the country on business, Vincent settles into a new routine, strolling the grounds, checking locks, driving the wife and kid for an outing to the beach. Diane Kruger is lovely and fragile here, with spurts of sharpness, and an occasional imperious attitude towards Vincent. Vincent is almost shy with her, feeling the vast class differences between them. He has no problem bonding with the family dog, however (a nice touch, calling to mind Arthur Miller's comment to Peter Bogdanovich on why his late wife Marilyn Monroe got along so well with children and animals: "They didn't sneer at her.") From the first moment he saw Jessie, crying in a bedroom during the party, Vincent is intensely drawn to her. As shattered as he is, he is a natural protector. (Schoenaerts often plays such roles, most memorably in "Bullhead" and "Rust and Bone." He's wonderful playing men bound up in muscles, unable to let loose their equally powerful tenderness. Schoenaerts' vulnerability as an actor leads him towards a rough and honest kind of truth.)

As the film plunges into a home-invasion thriller, with mysterious cars parked at the end of the driveway and shadowy figures stalking the house, some viewers may feel they have seen it all before. But Winocour has such a unique approach to the familiar material that the clichés (this is, after all, a genre film) are irrelevant. The entire story is told solely from Vincent's often-distorted point of view. Because of his considerable physical and emotional challenges, many of the sequences have a hallucinatory quality, starting with the party, where Vincent wanders through the crowd in slo-mo (the camera trailing along behind him, as it does throughout), the dance music's bass line throbbing, a sound Vincent feels, rather than hears. Vincent's brain, already flooded with excess adrenaline, cannot absorb what comes at him; he isn't sure if what he perceives is real or a phantom manifestation of war trauma. His confusion bleeds out into the audience. We question his reliability as a narrator. It's extremely effective. In a stunning sequence on the beach with Jessie and Ali, Vincent senses a threat, like an animal senses a predator approaching, even though it's as yet unseen. On high alert, he scans the benign landscape for what he knows is out there. 

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