Sentinelle (2021)

Sentinelle arrives from France with the modest ambition of a Tuesday night thriller: a traumatized soldier, a violated sister, a wealthy man who cannot be touched. Julien Leclercq directs with the economy of someone who has studied the genre and decided not to argue with it. Olga Kurylenko plays Klara, an interpreter returned from Syria with migraines, a pill habit, and a willingness to hit suspects harder than the situation requires. The film runs lean. It shows us the flashback of the boy with the explosives, then trusts us to carry it.

On the social ledger, the entries are thin but not empty. A woman carries a revenge narrative once reserved for men, and the supporting cast is drawn from a reasonably varied pool, though nobody in the production seems to have thought this worth announcing. There is a same-sex encounter at the nightclub, dispatched with the enthusiasm of a scene that needed to end. The plot's central revelation, that the oligarch's son prefers men, exists to explain a father's violence, not to advance any argument about dignity. Klara's trauma is treated as a medical condition, which is to say the film has no interest in diagnosing her beyond the obvious.

The villain is a Russian tycoon with a diplomatic passport, and the film permits a faint thrum of resentment toward money that places itself above the law. It never builds this into a sermon. Leclercq prefers silence, slow motion, and a fork in a Dubai hotel suite to any speech about justice. The result is a spare, competent, faintly familiar exercise, the sort of film that knows exactly what it is and declines to apologize. There is something almost restful about that.