In the palm-sweating opening movement of this gripping economic drama set in foreclosure-stricken 2010, Andrew Garfield’s single father Dennis Nash is summarily evicted from his Florida home by Michael Shannon’s vulpine Rick Carver, his belongings cast on to the street, his family dispatched to a seedy motel. Worse still, desperate Dennis soon finds himself working for Carver, evicting others as he learns that “America doesn’t bail out losers”. Like a modern day Wall Street, Chop Shop-director Ramin Bahrani’s terrifically taut thriller finds a young man being taught that “greed is good” by a reptilian father figure – roles that Garfield and Shannon play to the hilt, the former convincingly conflicted and anguished, the latter alternately repellent and spellbinding, like the high rollers from JC Chandor’s Margin Call. “Don’t get emotional about real estate,” warns Carver, but that’s exactly what we do as Bahrani and his cast crank up the tension in gut-wrenching fashion.
