Inspired by true-life tales culled from the Chinese social media website Weibo, Jia Zhangke's attention-grabbing epic (which won the Cannes screenplay prize this time last year) teases together four disparate stories of people driven to violence by the purgatorial pain of their modern existence. Inflected by genre (the martial arts films of King Hu are evidently an influence), the film counterbalances its social-realist reflections on life under creeping neo-capitalism with depictions of cinematic splatter; whether it's a lonely misfit enraged by the unshared profits of a privatised mine, or an emerging Lady Vengeance striking back at the indignities of a brothel, you can rest assured that there will be blood.

The results are deliberately disorienting, with some fans of previous films such as The World and Still Life apparently alarmed by the stark (a)tonal shift of Jia's latest. Certainly, as a state of the nation document, it paints a poisonous picture of people pushed beyond the boundaries of civilised behaviour by the sickness of the circumstances in which they live. This is a world of corruption, violence and despair depicted in a manner that not only flirts with, but positively embraces, the cathartic pleasures of exploitation cinema. In China, the film's release has been delayed amid official worries that it might provoke social unrest; proof, perhaps, that Jia's scattershot approach has hit at least some of its targets.