Dynamic and passionate, thrumming with barely suppressed anger, this sleek American indie has the brains of a documentary, the soul of a moral fable and the beating pulse of a thriller. Dramatising the toxic-mortgage nightmare that devoured swathes of middle America after the Global Financial Crisis, it opens with a literal death and then charts a slow spiritual one. This is a world, it seems to say, in which nobody wins - not even the winners.
Bahrani, the son of Iranian migrants, made his name with films exploring the immigrant experience, but the story he tells here is of a white working-class family: Dennis Nash (Garfield, the most recent Spider-Man) is a builder, a solo dad living in Orlando, Florida, which is, not incidentally, the home of that apotheosis of family cutesiness, Disney World.
But he's behind on the payments on the house he shares with his mother - Dern's brilliant, questing characterisation adds a heartbreaking hint of dementia - and his infant son, and that knock at the door in the first few minutes spells bad news.
On the doorstep is the evocatively named Rick Carver (Shannon), a real-estate "broker", who enforces foreclosures. With the help of a sheriff and a dedicated house-emptying crew, he soon has the Nash family's' life piled on the footpath.
There's nothing fanciful about the story here and Bahrani shows us where it starts in a magnificent courtroom scene where a judge processes the so-called "rocket docket", evicting a homeowner every few seconds: a man seeking to save his home is pictured in the middle of a jittery, whirling crowd, the still, bewildered centre of a world gone wild.
