Jason Fettes (Justin Hosking) asks: “are you good, Mac?”. These are the first words uttered in Craig Alexander and Shelly Higgs’ feature debut Snatchers. Wolfe ‘Mac’ MacFarlane (Alexander) is not so sure. After all, he is about to break bad, to engage in an extralegal scheme that involves, as Fettes puts it, “chopping up a dead girl and making a squillion” – and to make matters worse, that dead girl (Hannah McKenzie) bears more than a passing resemblance to Mac’s late, lamented daughter Hannah (Veronica Baroulina). Yet where Mac hesitates, Fettes has no scruples about what they are doing. “What”, he asks, “is the worst that could happen?”.

These two middle-aged men, best friends since childhood, are about to find out. For as Mac is on the point of making the first incision to remove the dead girl’s organs for illegal resale, she sits up on the slab, and after a series of flashbacks reveals how all three of these characters came to be here, the film picks up again from this moment of unexpected resurrection, as Mac and Fettes endure a long night of the soul where they are confronted with one moral conundrum after another that will test everything that they take for granted about themselves and each other.

Inspired by and named for Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story The Body Snatcher (1884), Snatchers sets itself up as falling somewhere between Hèctor Hernández Vicens ’The Corpse of Anna Fritz (2015) and André Øvredal’s The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016), but plays more like a comedy, with an initial focus on the two men’s clowning bonhomie. Yet the flashbacks reveal that all this is unfolding in a dystopian near future – or perhaps a parallel universe – where armed and masked law enforcers are on every corner, and where one’s identity data, credit rating and criminal record are all electronically encoded in wrist implants. Meanwhile the two friends, both lowly porters at a corporate hospital, have fallen into financial woes: Mac has just been fired when his past caught up with him at work, while Fettes is in debt to a moustachioed mobster (P.J. Williams) for his gambling. Desperate, Fettes draws Mac into his body snatching plan, and here they are, suddenly confronted with living, breathing proof of their errancy.

What ensues is a peculiar psychodrama, as the Jane Doe, who is actually called Jane, proves a lot smarter than her two knife-wielding captors, and is soon manipulating both into her doing her will – even as the precise nature of what she wants keeps shifting along with her story. The film too keeps shifting, as it casually adopts and abandons different genres. There is a medical song-and-dance number here, recurring pumpkin-themed erotica there. Reality itself seems up for grabs, as everyone lies in the stories they tell, and even the oldest of friends harbour long-term jealousies and seem incapable of being honest about their feelings.

In short, Snatchers is a bit of a mess, and one of those films whose big ideas and swinging ambitions are repeatedly, obviously held in check by budgetary limitations – although you cannot fault the filmmakers for trying. Its disparate elements and slippery narratives do all come together at the end, when the cards are finally laid on the table – but no matter what kind of a film viewers ultimately suppose that they have been watching, ultimately this remains what it was right from Fettes opening words to Mac: a moral story, raising explicitly ethical questions about how far its characters are willing, with just the slightest push, to go. If, as a recurring line in the film has it, “the world’s fucked”, then Fettes and Mac are not just victims, but very much part of the problem.

The world premiere of Snatchers takes place during the 33rd edition of Raindance, which takes place between June 18th and 27th.