The first image in Ramin Bahrani’s mortgage-crisis drama 99 HOMES, after the title has filled the screen in an ominous bright red font, is the bloody aftermath of a suicide by gunshot. The camera roves through the house like a voyeur, tracking Michael Shannon’s Rick Carver, the real estate broker who foreclosed on the suicide victim’s home, as he talks to the police officers present and his secretary via mobile phone with the same mile-a-minute tone of self-justification.

Set in Florida after the collapse of the US housing bubble which kicked off the global financial crisis of 2008, the film sets elements of bleak satire within a classic moralist drama about a Faustian bargain between two men.

Andrew Garfield, the British actor who played Peter Parker in the last two SPIDER-MAN films, here takes on a similarly all-American role as Dennis Nash, a construction worker who finds himself let go by his employer without back pay and evicted from his family home by none other than Carver all within the film’s opening minutes. Forced to relocate to a down-at-heel motel with his mother (Laura Dern) and his young son, he spends his days looking for housebuilding work, which has almost totally dried up as foreclosures and evictions sweep across the state.

A chance encounter brings him back into Carver’s orbit, who offers him a job and opportunities for further money that he’s too desperate to turn down. There are subtler ways to imply Nash is doing a dirty job than to show him literally shovelling human waste out of an abandoned house, but the film’s bluntness works in its favour. shannon, a master at portraying barely-concealed menace, pitches his performance somewhere between the scenery-chewing antics of his villainous turn in PREMIUM RUSH and the controlled intensity he shows in films like TAKE SHELTER. As in all deal-with-the-devil stories, he has enough charisma and intelligence to make Nash want to commit further despite himself, and even as both men insist they’re only working to further their own ends, the relationship between them grows.

Carver has a racket going where he forecloses on abandoned houses, repairs them using government bailout money, then sells them on at a profit. Nash takes to his semi-legal dogsbody work with startling swiftness, and it isn’t long before Nash is evicting people himself. His transformation from victim to perpetrator is a disturbing reminder of how people associate self-worth with the job they do, and can rationalise their own deeds to an extreme degree.

HOMES can’t be faulted for its moral clarity and sharp commentary on a brutally competitive society.

While insisting he’s only making the best of a bad situation, Carver seems to relish being a hate figure, showing off the concealed handgun he carries and bragging about being threatened by enraged homeowners. “America doesn’t bail out losers,” he snarls to Nash at one point. “America bails out winners.” The dramatic crux of the film is whether Nash will succumb to his ultra-cynical worldview in his efforts to provide for his family.

The film takes an unromantic view of Florida, shooting with mostly handheld cameras in a muted colour palette. The suburban subdivisions are cramped and dark inside, and the rich folks’ houses are styled in arid depersonalised fashion. Every interior is either too small or too big for the characters. The only touch of natural beauty in the film is a brief glimpse of the Florida Keys, with tacky McMansions backing on to the water.

Viewers may be reminded of THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES, the 2012 documentary about a one-percenter couple whose grandiose plans for a Florida mansion founder amidst the financial crisis. However, everyone in HOMES is sweaty, scrambling and desperate. Even Carver is struggling to stay afloat; he urgently needs to close a deal that will make him financially secure.

The film’s climax is a big old-fashioned showdown in which the hero must choose expediency or principles, having betrayed the trust of his family and his own conscience. If it’s a scene we’ve seen before, Garfield and Shannon’s performances and the urgency of the direction give it dramatic heft. HOMES can’t be faulted for its moral clarity and sharp commentary on a brutally competitive society.

99 HOMES screens on 6 September at 18.45 at the Light Cinema