A chiseled, battered man sits at a typewriter, looking very much like the height of his data entry experience consisted of a debit card purchase where he had to input his PIN and ZIP code. It is Remy (Jude Law) and he is writing his manifesto, giving up the dirt on his life as a repo man. This manuscript, although its margins, spelling, punctuation and narrative will be head-poundingly rough and hard to follow, is bound for greatness. Because, you see, Remy’s story isn’t about taking back the 50-inch plasma TV from the shopaholic down the street with the wallet full of maxed out store credit cards. It’s about repossessing organs.

People in the future, you see, won’t just demand access to the world’s knowledge, music, movies and pornography from a shiny device smaller than a pack of cards. They will demand that their irregularly beating hearts, their cancer-chewed pancreases, their sun-scarred skin be replaced with the newest and freshest technology — bionic organs. This being America, of course, the organs will cost $765,000. And no one will be turned down. Because there’s a payment plan for everyone.

Is “Repo Men” brutal? One could make the argument that our reality is worse. Last month, a teen jumped into a lake to save a drowning boy in Kenosha, Wisc. Emergency responders treated the teen after the incident. His family then received a four-figure bill. One anonymous pundit bravely spoke truth to power in the comments section of the article: “People expect ER’s and hospitals to ‘be there’ when needed, then publish crap like this when the dare to ‘send a bill.’” If you agree with that, imagine what it would be like if the family whose home burned down because of a wiring fault was sent a bill when the fire department responded, or if the police department charged you for coming out to dust for prints after burglars ransacked your home.

No, “Repo Men” isn’t an original concept. “Repo! The Genetic Opera” did it. Monty Python even did it, though “Repo Men” has less cartoonish absurdity and more snicking, slicing, stabbing sound effects and passionate, bloody groping in a shiny steel set stolen from a Lady Gaga video. (The pinnacle of this movie’s sensuality comes during a scene where Remy and his love interest slice each other open to scan and deactivate their titanium kidneys and cobalt alloy clavicles. They moan and pry as almost-black blood gushes from their wounds, too much in shock, apparently, to care about the bacterial implications of sticking ungloved hands into body cavities and holding your 11-blade scalpel in your mouth. It’s pornography for the body modification and scan-it-yourself-lane-at-Home-Depot set.)

The value of “Repo Men” isn’t originality. It’s a philosophical experiment, a 21st century “Modern Proposal.” It takes two horrible situations we take as necessary parts of our system — a lack of organ donors and a poor class that can’t afford the basic trappings of life — and combines them.

If you accept both separately, explain why combining them is distasteful? Explain why it’s cruel in sci fi to slice out the bionic liver with a past due payment, but not to send a bill for $200,000 to the victim of a car crash whose survival depended on a helicopter, another piece of technology. That path of reasoning is untenable: if you believe it, you admit that you think people with no money are simply screwed. You admit that if a humane society works collectively to keep all its creatures alive and well (just as it works to keep its borders secure from foreign attack) then a “humane” society is not a priority.

Hopefully, that tears up your heart. If this movie does nothing else, it’s worth reminding you you still have one.

Ashley O’Dell writes about movies that aren’t in theaters anymore.