Nobody does self-loathing with quite the same dissolute panache as Philip Seymour Hoffman. It’s a talent that is particularly well used in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, a brooding crime thriller expertly crafted by the 83-year-old director Sidney Lumet.

Hoffman plays Andy, the bigger and brasher of two brothers whose desperate scheme to reverse their ailing fortunes is the trigger for the spiralling melodrama. As a man, he’s as hollow as the rumbling, mirthless laugh he uses to fill in the cracks in his life. Andy is on borrowed time. He has been subsidising his glittering but unfulfilling lifestyle by dipping into the coffers of the company for which he works. Now the auditors are following a trail of missing money, which leads, inexorably, back to him. But Andy has a plan – a one-off robbery of a suburban jewellery store, a “mom and pop” operation with negligible security. All he needs is someone weak and equally desperate for money to pull off the heist. Enter Andy’s younger brother Hank (a hangdog Ethan Hawke), a low-achiever who owes three months of child support for a daughter who has already dismissed her dad as a loser.

The film’s jagged, non-linear structure means that we learn early on that the robbery doesn’t go as planned. But this in no way relaxes the film’s stranglehold of tension. Lumet’s experience combined with the fresh eyes of first-time screenwriter Kelly Masterson makes for a powerful package.

Masterson puts as much effort into some interesting peripheral details as he does into character development and structure, resulting in some of the film’s most memorable moments, notably a kimono-clad drug dealer who deals out dismissively bitchy put-downs along with his high-grade heroin. The script is not without a couple of implausible plot points, but nothing so serious that it undermines the credibility of this enjoyable movie.

Cert 15, 116mins

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