Contract killer Viktor (Joachim Król) leads an invisible life. He carries off his assignments so silently that surveillance equipment cannot detect him. Off duty, he keeps to himself in sparse, subterranean rooms, interacting only with his handler and surrogate father figure, Martin (Peter Fitz). When Viktor begins to develop a relationship with Nina (Nadja Uhl), an innocent bystander to one of his assignments, he sees a chance at a meaningful, less violent life.

But Viktor soon finds that being seen comes at a heavy price: Hot on Viktor’s trail is Lang (Christian Berkel), a brilliant but unconventional police profiler who may just be Viktor’s match and won’t let him walk away from his past so easily. Playing at Woodmere at 7 p.m. on Nov. 10, director Mennan Yapo’s “Soundless” is a taut and stylish European crime thriller, and a meditation on cycles of violence on the toll it takes on those who enact it.

Released in 2004, “Soundless” feels of a piece with the wave neo-noir and crime pictures that were cresting in the early 2000s with the early works of David Fincher, Christopher Nolan and Matthew Vaughn, whose star-making “Layer Cake” debuted the same year as “Soundless.” Like so many of those films, “Soundless” features slick, desaturated cinematography, an even slicker electronic score, and at the center, a man trying to untangle himself from a web of crime and violence. Like the best of these works, there’s ample substance beneath the surface to match its undeniable style. In “Soundless,” this takes the form of a pervading sense of melancholy and loneliness that underpins the crime intrigue.

For all its cinematic style, “Soundless” does not present its world of criminals and killers as particularly glamorous. The action takes place across a landscape of boxy office buildings and hotels. The motives behind the assassinations are murky and unromantic, and killers and targets alike are marked by their solitude. Far from the pop-culture-savvy hipsters of Quentin Tarantino flicks and the elegant, luxury hotel-haunting killers of the “John Wick” movies, Yapo portrays the inhabitants of his criminal underworld as leading fundamentally empty lives.

In keeping with the empty world Yapo builds is Joachim Król’s delicate performance as Viktor. Though he executes his assignments with quiet precision, Viktor is no one’s idea of an action hero. When he’s not working, Viktor looks uncomfortable and awkward, his large and expressive eyes conveying a worn-out sadness after years spent living in the shadows. There is a yearning for warmth in his interactions with his dying surrogate father Martin, their affection for each other kept at arm’s length by their professional responsibilities. When Martin tells Viktor to consider his own future once he is gone, the look in Viktor’s eyes suggests that this is beyond his comprehension. When Viktor and Nina’s paths cross for the first time following his assignment, it’s shot with high-contrast brightness that suggests a man who is discovering a sense of vibrancy for the first time in his life.

Is Viktor the agent of a violent world or a victim of one? This is the central question posed by “Soundless.” As firebrand criminal profiler Lang pieces together the details of Viktor’s life, a portrait emerges of a man whose life has been marked by tragic violence from his earliest days and who has been hollowed out by a childhood desire for revenge. Lang, with his animated mannerisms and abhorrence of violence, provides an intriguing foil to Viktor as he doggedly pursues him. Their conflict is as much philosophical as it is physical, Viktor and his relationship with Nina representing redemption and the potential for love to undo a cycle of violence, and Lang representing justice and the cost of taking a life being paid in full. Until the film’s final minutes, it is unclear which side ultimately will prevail.

“Soundless” succeeds because it is a rumination on the nature of violence brilliantly disguised as a taut crime thriller. It unravels the threads of the action genre without sacrificing an ounce of style or suspense in the process. While it may not be as well-known as some of its early-aughts crime contemporaries, “Soundless” more than earns its place among them.

“Soundless” screens at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 10, as part of the Tuesday Nights at the Movies series at Woodmere, 9201 Germantown Ave. in Chestnut Hill. The film is presented in German with English subtitles. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and light refreshments will be provided prior to the screening. Tuesday Nights at the Movies screenings are free to the public, but donations are greatly appreciated.