Five men wake up in a disused warehouse on the Mexican border. Two of them (Caviezel and Barry Pepper) sport impressive bruises, another (Kinnear) a broken nose, while a mousey middle-aged gent (Pantoliano) is bound to a chair and a young greaser (Jeremy Sisto) is cuffed to a railing with a bullet in his shoulder. And all of them have been struck by amnesia.

Using cryptic clues and snatches of memory to piece together what has gone down; the men realize two of them have been kidnapped, and during an escape attempt a gas canister was set-off resulting in loss of consciousness and memory.

Why the kidnapping, and more importantly, who has been kidnapped and who are the kidnappers?

Lean and taut, Unknown boasts more invention and edge-of-seat tension in 80 minutes than a dozen bloated blockbusters.

Working from Matthew Waynee’s crafty puzzlebox script, director Brand keeps the mystery barrelling along full clip with kinetic, nervy visuals and a sure hand that keeps the audience guessing but never scratching its head.

Snatches of (unreliable?) memory keep the suspense needle high, and a parallel subplot with the police chasing the ransom money does nothing to diffuse the paranoia in the warehouse.

The cast throw themselves into the tricksy fun, with Caviezel reminding us how good he can be when not walking on water, and a gruff against type Kinnear as fine here as in Little Miss Sunshine.

No small debt is owed to recent indie franchise Saw, plus Reservoir Dogs and John Carpenter’s classic The Thing, and the final 20 minutes threatens to settle down in more conventional territory, but Unknown proves itself an impressive thriller, with a couple of late tricks up its sleeve that should leave everyone satisfied.

Rob Daniel