RUTHFULLY YOURS

At its simplest the story concerns someone looking for someone to do some reliable work, meaning a shadowy piece of business—extracting an unspecified document from an office safe—commissioned by a shadowy middleman, Brendan Fraser’s Jones, on behalf of an anonymous employer. (A quick word about those shadows. Mr. Soderbergh shot the film himself, as he has often done, and his cinematography draws ravishingly beautiful distinctions between total darkness and a palette of brooding colors that represent the participants’ plights.)

The first hire is Curt Goynes, a petty criminal with a blighted past played by Don Cheadle. Soon he’s joined by Benicio Del Toro’s charmingly devious Ronald Russo. Both men are supervised by Kieran Culkin’s Charley, who’s too sleazy to have a last name, on a surprise visit to the suburbs, where an attractive couple and their two kids live in a pleasant brick house. Every time a new set of characters is introduced, the screenplay, by Ed Solomon (“Men in Black”), ups its ante of tension. That’s true of the suburban family, particularly the brittle, cheerful mother, Mary Wertz ( Amy Seimetz ), and the father, Matt Wertz (David Harbour), a man of not-so-quiet desperation who knows someone who knows the safe’s combination.

Gradually, however, Curt emerges as the movie’s main man, maybe even its knight of honor, while Mr. Cheadle reveals depths we haven’t seen in the course of his distinguished career. Gone is the lethal insouciance of Maurice, the dapper psychopath who drives the plot in “Out of Sight.” Curt is haunted, somber, spiritually wounded, and at a point in life where it’s too late to make up for lost time. The best he can hope for is working his modest side game and settling a few accounts.

Everyone in “No Sudden Move” has a side game, from wretched Charley on up to Matt Damon’s Mr. Big, a marvelously suave captain of industry who can’t stop making money. (“It’s like a lizard’s tail. I work, it grows. I sleep, it grows.”) Paradoxically, no one has personal autonomy, from Mr. Big on down. He knows he doesn’t, and freely admits it. Others pretend they do, but they have no idea who they’re being controlled by.

Almost everyone, Curt being the notable exception, invests huge energy in maintaining a façade. That is to say, the film functions as social satire, but in a deft style that is best represented by a fleeting moment in the Wertzes’ back yard. It’s when Mary, at the breaking point for more reasons than a home invasion, asks her friend and confidante Dawn (Katherine Banks), “How do people do it?” Then she follows the question with a small, forlorn gesture that suggests everything she means—the pretty clothes she must wear, the garden she must tend, the children she must raise, the husband she must endure, the whole apparatus that constitutes her life.

Over the years Mr. Soderbergh has not only made a host of distinctive films, as well as a few clunkers—he has become a maestro of astute casting. The finely tuned ensemble in “No Sudden Move” includes Bill Duke, Ray Liotta, Jon Hamm and Craig muMs Grant (who died earlier this year), plus the excellent young actor Noah Jupe ; he plays Matthew, the Wertzes’ wary teenage son. And the filmmaker’s fondness for photography includes a gimlet eye for period detail. That’s evident from the first few cars we see on the streets and in the driveways—a two-tone Kaiser, a quaint Nash station wagon, a sturdy Willys sedan, if I’m not mistaken, and several graceless progeny of the 1954 merger of Studebaker and Packard.