99 Homes

99 Homes (2015) is Ramin Bahrani's tense morality drama, available to watch online on iFILM. A construction worker is thrown out of his own house, then hired to do the throwing.

Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) loses his home to foreclosure and crams his mother and son into a roadside motel. Out of pure desperation, he takes a job with the very broker who evicted him — Rick Carver, played with cold menace by Michael Shannon. Carver turns other people's ruin into profit, flipping repossessed houses and gaming the banks and the government along the way. Nash learns the trade fast and the money starts pouring in. The catch: now he's the one knocking on doors with eviction papers in hand.

Bahrani built a sharp film about the 2008 housing collapse where there are no cartoon villains, just a system that grinds people down through money. Shannon's icy operator earned him a Golden Globe nomination, and that ever-present vape became the character's signature. It cuts deepest for anyone who has ever feared losing the roof over their head. Stream 99 Homes (2015) online on iFILM.