To enter Sidney Lumet’s masterfully conceived drama is like stepping onto a treadmill that you can’t get off of--and then find that the treadmill is booby-trapped with explosives at every other step. There is no--repeat, no--recent American film that feels so dangerously tense as this one, but the miraculous aspect of Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, and particularly the screenplay by first-time screenwriter Kelly Masterson, is how the grueling tension is intricately tied to a deeply felt family tragedy. The mechanics of Masterson’s multilayered, time-shifting story structure have been dovetailed to the majestic sorrows of something approaching a Theodore Dreiser novel.

When a jewelry store heist, led by Ethan Hawke’s Hank, goes awry, it appears that Lumet is merely reworking a far milder version of his methodical 70s thriller, “The Anderson Tapes.” But please notice the movie’s first startling image--you won’t forget it for weeks, maybe forever--and how Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Andy regards himself in the mirror as he does his husbandly duties upon dutiful wife Gina (Marisa Tomei). What follows is a chain of deceit and self-delusion, triggered by the needs of those who lead lives of quiet desperation: Brothers Hank and Andy have reached the point of financial meltdown, and the saga demonstrates the extremes to which some men will go to rescue themselves, even at the cost of severe harm to their family, including their father Charles (Albert Finney), in ways they would have never imagined.

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