Rydal (Oscar Isaac) is a handsome young American of good stock mooching around Europe, flirting with heiresses and pulling minor scams when he should be carving out a brilliant career at home. “Well, Chester, first I have to work out what I want to do.” Who’s Chester? That’d be the shonky stockbroker on the lam in Athens with a pretty young wife (Kirsten Dunst) and a strong resemblance to Rydal’s overbearing, recently-deceased father. Oh, and he’s played by Viggo 'History-of-Violence' Mortensen. This is probably going to go well.

The Two Faces of January is the directorial debut of Hossein Amini, who also adapted it for the screen from a Patricia Highsmith novel. It’s an Americans-in-Europe crime thriller, which normally makes for pretty good escapism. Plus, it’s set in 1967, when the frocks were better and not only villains smoked. January is high-Highsmith Eurocamp, and Amini would have seemed the perfect choice to helm an adaptation, considering his script for Drive somehow managed to be both lurid and genuinely touching. Sadly, his latest script is less aery – many opportunities for humour and dramatic tension are sunk by stodgy psychologising.

The best bits are early on, when a precarious balance is maintained between the competing wills and motives of thief, wife and drifter. Marcel Zyskind’s camera stays in claustrophobic shallow focus, scrutinising the rumpled linens and baggy, tired eyes of the travellers. A low-light graininess and an ochre filter replicates 1960s Eastmancolor (or the way it looks to us, anyway, now it’s red-shifted in the can), but the every-pore close-ups are unmistakably digital. The anachronistic texture doesn’t really tell us anything, though, it just is – like all the fetishistic shots of fedoras and pastel headscarves. This is the sixties as seen from the couch at 2am after a Netflix marathon. 

Honestly, I think I would have enjoyed this film more if I hadn’t had to review it. It looks good. The pacing satisfies. I started out earnestly scribbling notes like “ouzo – bickering – white elephants” and “Asterion ref – father/monster?” – but when a character says “Wait here, I’ll be right back” before literally descending into the labyrinth of Knossos, flickering Zippo in hand, you start to feel a little bit punked.

Normally I’m a sucker for an Americans-in-Europe thriller. They let you pretend you’re in the Greek islands, and they elevate the banalities of leisure travel to high drama. Schlubs like us heft heavy suitcases, forget our passports in hotels, and suffer through our companions’ sulking fits. It all becomes more glamorous if those suitcases are crammed with ill-gotten cash and you’re wanted for murder. Movies like The Good Thief (Neil Jordan, 2002) and Minghella’s 1999 Ripley are great crime yarns that also capture the aspirational glamour and petty frustrations of being an ocean away from home. In The Two Faces of January, what with the sweat, the bad booze and the arguments, it all ends just ends up being a bit knackering – and not just for the characters on screen.