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The majority of scenes in 99 Homes (2015) take place within living spaces — from family homes to motels to mansions. The visual depiction and sound environment of these various homes create strong emotional reactions for the audience and impart judgments about the characters who live in each space. Ultimately, the film uses its contrasting home spaces to send a moral message about how human beings relate to the places in which they live and, more importantly, to the people with whom they share this earth.

The first and most central home we’re concerned with is the place where our protagonist Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) grew up and where he now lives with his hairdresser mother, Lynn (Laura Dern), and sweet-natured, concerned son, Connor (Noah Lomax). The film’s events all follow from the dilemma of Nash’s being unable to keep up payments on the house and the series of choices he makes as a result of the crushing pressure to avoid homelessness for his family. When we meet Nash, he’s fighting against hope to halt his family’s impending eviction, but — in an emotionally devastating early scene — Nash and Lynn are forced out of the house under the supervision of flashy, unemotional real estate mogul Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) and an escort of police.

Nash’s house is nothing remarkable — it’s small, humble, regular-looking, just like the others on the block. But it does the job. It’s got the space the family needs; it’s got memories. It has frequent visitors coming and going from the neighborhood (Lynn’s customers, Connor’s schoolfriend). It’s not the King of the Hill, but it’s real and loved with strong roots in the community. It’s a home — no more, no less.

Soon after Nash’s eviction, Carver spots the young man’s potential as a resourceful, jack-of-all-trades worker and begins molding Nash into his right-hand man. The first time Nash visits the house where Carver’s family lives (one of many Carver owns), Nash watches the rich man’s daughters playing by the pool and seems pained by the sight of so much picturesque luxury. As the film goes on, the symbol of the backyard pool comes to haunt Nash, representing a lifestyle that both tempts and appalls him. When Carver starts offering Nash miscellaneous work (first construction-related, then shadier and more profitable in nature), Nash is so ecstatic to get paid that he leaps at the chance, gamely assisting Carver even as the jobs involve more openly illegal ploys to steal cash from the government.

Carver’s dwelling places are the opposite of Nash’s. To Carter — who explicitly says that homes are nothing but boxes and warns it’s unwise to get emotional about real estate — “homes” are money. In addition to the house where Carver’s family lives (which he plans to flip in a few months), Carver houses his “sweetheart,” a college student studying graphic design, in another place he will flip. It is a show house, with almost no furniture. As a wide shot looks into the lit-up house during a raucous party Nash attends there, we have the sense of looking into an empty model of a home. It is beautiful, perfect, rich, but not the place somebody lives.

The fact that Carver owns so many homes is used as a condemnation of his character. That he does not value the home of his wife and daughters enough to refrain from reselling for a profit shows no limit to what he will sacrifice for a sale. That he populates each new property with a different mistress (he tempts Nash with the vision of a whole series of homes with a woman to fill each one) shows he views people as means to satisfy his goals and pleasure. The film implies that a man with too many homes, like the man without a home, is lost to himself.

Before long, Carver assists Nash in buying back his family home. Nash, Lynn and Connor return to the house in a jubilant scene, yet the film’s charged atmosphere of peril and foreboding — underlined by the forever-shaky handheld camera and the disquieting score — does not relent here, either. We sense that entering into this contract with Carver is a point of no return for Nash. It will only get harder to extract himself.

The film also features a series of eviction scenes, in which people are turned out of their homes and react with powerful anger, sadness, denial and fear. As Nash becomes the evictor (albeit an apologetic, sympathetic one) and echoes the role Carver played as the antagonist in his own eviction, these scenes are an important reminder of the deal with the devil Nash has made to regain his home and save his family from poverty. Each time he forces someone out, Nash must re-confront the choice to work for Carver. We have the sense of a direct relation between taking other people’s homes and regaining his own — that Nash has agreed to throw others into hell in order to climb out of it himself.

Then one day Nash drives by a luxurious for-sale house, owned by Carver. The film score gives us a rare pause here, leaving us silence apart from the seductive lure of the wind rustling through the palm trees overlooking the house. Out the back window, of course, is a pool. Nash buys the house, and we have the distinct sense of a man caving to a temptation that has made him forget his quest — an Odysseus giving way to the sirens. The mission driving Nash has been reclaiming his family home. All along, he has understand that it’s more than a house; it’s a home — his home. Yet, on a sudden whim, he sells that home for a beautiful house.

Meanwhile, while waiting to move back into the family house, Nash, Lynn and Connor have been living in a grim, noisy motel full of other evicted families. The environment is loud, hectic, and grating. Lynn understands that the people in the motel are never getting out of it, and she desperately wants to leave, lest they become another of these permanently displaced families. Connor is unhappy to be displaced, cut off from his old friends and school. The motel becomes an even more hostile environment when a man arrives who recognises Nash from his eviction and alerts the community that Nash is working for their collective enemy.

But when Nash brings Lynn and Connor to the new luxury home he’s purchased, they grow suspicious and upset. Now knowing that he is making money by evicting others, they feel this house to be someone else’s — a home that some unlucky soul was evicted from. They don’t want to live in someone else’s home. They want their own, however humble it may be in comparison.

Nash is left looking out on his pool in a gorgeous, empty house that is made to look as lifeless and cold as possible. It’s minimally furnished with echoing, marble interiors. It has no past and promises a sterile future. As the owner of this expensive house, Nash has never seemed more separated from the former richness of his previous family life.

Interestingly, although Nash rises into a position of financial security wherein the danger would seem to be lessening, our sense of peril only grows. The more money Nash earns, the more we fear for him, and he never seems so at risk as when he has bought the beautiful luxury home with the big American pool. It becomes apparent that the greatest danger Nash faces is the potential loss of his morality, his family and, ultimately, his soul.

Nash’s final test at the end of the film centers yet again around a living space. When that test comes, we understand that much more than a house is at stake. The portrayal of the various home spaces in 99 Homes has imparted its strong moral message about what makes us spiritually wealthy, what decency requires of us, and which core values we must preserve at all costs.