All that S Craig Zahler does, he does methodically and deliberately. The director exercises surgically precise control over each minute in the nearly three-hour run time of his latest feature, Dragged Across Concrete. He crafts dialogue with the florid, evocative quality endemic to writers who get their start on pulp literature, wielding similes like brass knuckles. His supreme confidence also extends to his pacing, which both is and is not leisurely; he likes to let his moments breathe and unfold, albeit for the purpose of amplifying the agony in what are already excruciatingly intense scenes.

A sampling of those scenes: city cops Brett Ridgeman (Mel Gibson) and Anthony Lurasetti (Vince Vaughn) lie in wait outside of a perp’s fire escape, and stamp his head into the landing’s wrought-iron grate for sport. Moments later, they menace the arrested man’s half-naked girlfriend, plying her with a false promise of leniency for her cooperation before tossing her aside with a flurry of racial invective. Ridgeman uses inflammatory language liberally over the course of the film, much of it directed at the black youth in his neighborhood that we’re shown harassing his daughter.

If Zahler was some no-talent hack, it would be easy to dismiss the moral grotesquerie on display in Dragged Across Concrete as a feral howl from the fringes. But he’s a bona fide film artist, a critical favorite as well as a regular presence at the prestigious Venice film festival. His yen for ambiguity has qualified him for greater plaudits, and with them, a more stringent appraisal. It is specifically because Zahler knows exactly what he’s doing, and that he doesn’t want us to know, that his every move merits close consideration.

Tilt your head a little to the left, and the vision of Zahler as stealth fascist starts to come into focus. From the outset of his career in feature work, he’s drawn accusations of smuggling reactionary politics into our entertainment; his western horror Bone Tomahawk trembled before cannibalistic natives terrorizing the white settlers, and his recent Brawl on Cell Block 99 imagined a rightwinger nightmare of prison life’s racial dynamics. Dragged Across Concrete’s producer Dallas Sonnier (who has his own reasons to fixate on fantasies of violence and revenge) claimed in the Hollywood Reporter that “I don’t necessarily crave a conservative audience, but that may be an outcome, and it wouldn’t surprise me.” And yet the output from his production house Cinestate regularly positions white men as the last defense against a world of drugs, crime and rape.

The more lenient slant on this argument frames Zahler as an exploitation purist who won’t let our changing times drag him out of the 70s. In some instances, such as the Asian abortion doctor in Brawl that pops up in apparent homage to old-school Orientalism, his attachment to the past is pretty straightforwardly indefensible. But more often than not, it manifests as homage to older genre traditions.

He takes his cues from Death Wish and the films of Don Siegel, where the vigilante willing to defy the law in order to enforce it reigned as king. A hero could do villainous things and remain worthy of the viewer’s emotional investment, so long as all civilian-brutalizing was in the name of justice. When Gibson’s harried officer Ridgeman – and the simple casting of questionably repentant bigot Gibson and vocal Republican supporter Vaughn raises plenty of flags all on its own – breaks the rules, we still feel compelled to follow him wherever he’s going. (This is also due in part to Gibson still being a very good actor, frustrating as it may be to admit.)

Vince Vaughn and Mel Gibson in Dragged Across Concrete. Photograph: David Bukach

As it often does, the truth hides somewhere in the middle of these two notions. Each time Zahler transgresses, he provides enough internal counterargument to muddy anyone’s interpretation. Ridgeman and his lieutenant (Don Johnson) commiserate over how everyone’s so quick to get offended these days, the dead giveaway phrase for tacit Trumpian leanings, and then the senior officer tells Ridgeman he’s out of control and in danger of being consumed by hate. Black characters often do things to earn and justify Ridgeman’s distrust, as if the film wants to blame racism on those that bear its brunt, but declining to place trust in the mutual humanity of a man of color ultimately gets Ridgeman killed. There’s enough ammunition for either ideological side, leaving only an unsavory not-knowing.

Except that this uncertainty is Zahler’s designated end point for the discourse surrounding his films, not a middle everyone gets stuck in together. Martin Scorsese, the master of depicting abhorrent behavior without endorsing it, provides ample clues clarifying his stance on the sins of his creations. But Zahler’s inquests into the souls of reprehensible men effortfully clear room for doubt and discomfort. Those two feelings are the hallmarks of any competent antihero drama, the mechanisms that force the audience to confront their own identification with a bad person. They’re undoubtedly a big part of Zahler’s objective in making his films as well, the flaw being in his method of attaining them. The slippery fish that is art doesn’t really lend itself to designations of fairness and unfairness, but there’s really no other way to characterize Zahler’s habit of saying one thing through his mouthpieces in the script, then saying the opposite to sow misgivings. He directly jabs at an audience’s softest spots with his provocations, and backtracks just enough to make us wonder if we need to stop hitting ourselves.

In a recent interview about Dragged Across Concrete, Zahler predicted that “60% will like it, 20% will think it’s disgusting and offensive, and 20% will think it’s boring, and those stats hold with all of my movies.” He wants to make a Rorschach blot of his film, to shrug and ask “who, me?” when someone cries that they’ve been triggered. However, there’s a word for people who consciously antagonize others and then claim that the mark is merely projecting their objections onto the antagonism: trolls. Zahler’s a troll par excellence, literally elevating the act to an art form. But at the end of the day, a troll is a troll is a troll is a troll.