Grade: B-

Christian Petzold, the director of this steamy German thriller, demonstrates real talent at creating a tense, disturbing atmosphere and a sense of imminent violence. One gets the queasy feeling throughout “Jerichow,” called after the small town in which it’s set, that all hell could break loose at any moment.

But in writing the script, Petzold shows less imagination. Basically he’s dusted off James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” which has already been filmed that many times in Hollywood alone. (There are at least two more European versions.) True, he gives the story of the handsome Joe who falls for his employer’s sultry wife—with potentially homicidal results—a peculiarly Teutonic touch, not only in terms of the setting but in some intriguing details (like making the husband a man of Turkish descent, which doesn’t just play to the ethnic divisions in today’s Germany but turns them on their head). And he employs significant plot changes, not only in terms of the murder that the lovers plan but in the denouement, which will startle anyone familiar with Cain (though not necessarily in a good way, since it depends on a revelation that comes out of left field).

The result is a picture in which mood is pretty much everything, and while Petzold certainly does his part to provide it, his cast isn’t uniformly as successful. Nina Hoss is good as Laura, a trashy but alluring blonde who’s alternately pouty and clinging. (In her drab jeans, she’s no Lana Turner, but this is a very different take on the material.) But Benno Fuermann, whose early work showed a promise not fully realized in his more recent films, comes across convincingly brawny but a mite stolid as the hardened ex-soldier Thomas, dishonorably discharged after a stint in Afghanistan, who’s down on his luck and desperate for a job. (He’s been accosted just after his mother’s funeral by a thuggish creditor who beats him up and absconds with the cash he’d intended to use to fix up the run-down rural family homestead.)

Destiny throws Thomas together with Laura’s vulgar but rich husband Ali Ozkan (Hilmi Sozer, who pretty much steals the show with his forceful, bulldozer-like performance), whom he rescues from a drunken-driving charge. When in a later indiscretion the boozy Ali loses his driver’s license, he hires Thomas to ferry him about to the 40-odd fast-food outlets he owns in the area in order to restock them, check on the books and collect the profits.

But Thomas finds an extra job benefit in Laura, and before long the two are engaged in store-room clinches that are especially dangerous because of Ali’s suspicious and volatile nature. Nevertheless when he goes off on a trip to Turkey, ostensibly to check on property he has there, he leaves matters both professional and personal in the hands of Thomas, who lays them even more openly on Laura; and when she explains that a pre-nuptial agreement would leave her penniless if she left Ali, they two cook up a plan to get rid of him when he returns. The site will be a beach with an overhanging cliff where Ali and Laura are accustomed to go for afternoon frolics.

This is actually a very simple story—too simple, really, as Petzold puts Thomas and Laura into one another’s arms so speedily that the effect is almost comical. But that’s a convention of the genre, and one either accepts it or just turns off; credibility has never been a noir strong suit. And as far as it goes, “Jerichow” generates enough of the requisite simmering heat and smoldering tension to satisfy anybody looking for a modern forties-style domestic crime melodrama. The writer-director is fortunate in having a crew that ably abets his dark vision—especially cinematographer Hans Fromm, who captures images that are at once lucid and vaguely menacing, and editor Bettina Boehler, who has trimmed things down to a taut ninety minutes without sacrificing languorousness when necessary.

“Jerichow” isn’t startlingly new, but it’s a nice twist on a familiar formula, and should satisfy anyone who wants to see the postman, as it were, ring yet again.