“If you have more than one home, you can't be in all of them at once. That's a risk you take being rich, I suppose.” —“Union of Arsonists”

The new movie Doomsdays bills itself as a pre-apocalyptic comedy, which means it’s set in the present. It’s about two friends who live off the land. But Dirty Fred (Justin Rice) and Bruho (Leo Fitzpatrick) aren’t urban farmers or primitivist dumpster-divers: They break into empty vacation homes in the Catskills and hang out until they get bored or caught or eat all the food.

The movie’s landscape is sparse, with empty houses speckling the woods and only an occasional furious owner. Like in a zombie movie, Fred and Bruho are always on the run. But since the apocalypse hasn’t happened, it’s not clear if they’re the zombies or the survivors. “If you were on the Titanic, and you knew there weren’t enough lifeboats for you,” Fred asks, “wouldn’t you live it up at the bar?” The Titanic metaphor is apt: Who cares about property rights on a sinking ship? A bottle of booze belongs to whoever drinks it, because everything is going to hell anyway.

And as far as Bruho is concerned, we’re going to get there in a car. A believer in the Peak Oil theory of imminent global catastrophe (generally regarded as a wacko conspiracy mystification), Bruho refuses to ride in cars. He relaxes by taking a crowbar to any gas-guzzling automobile he can get his hands on. Though Bruho is probably wrong about how exactly humanity ends, pre-apocalyptic is as accurate a description for our current epoch as any; global warming isn’t any less disastrous than Peak Oil in its implications.

The way I see it, the pre-apocalyptic happens when the unspoken social rules that keep everyone in their place begin to fail, when scientists first see the inescapable meteor coming and the people learn about it and start looting. It’s the disaster before the disaster. Are we there yet? How would we know? The latest trend among the ultra-wealthy is to make dire predictions about social disintegration. Most recently, South African billionaire Johann Rupert warned Bloomberg Business about the impending crisis: “We cannot have 0.1 percent of 0.1 percent taking all the spoils. It’s unfair and it is not sustainable,” he told the reporters. “How is society going to cope with structural unemployment and the envy, hatred and the social warfare? … We’re in for a huge change in society. Get used to it. And be prepared.” Be prepared, in other words, for many more Dirty Freds and Bruhos.

Once we’ve entered the pre-apocalyptic, well-stocked vacation homes are especially at risk. By definition they’re vacant most of the time, and, as Fred points out, far from the city’s dense policing. There are also a lot of them. The George W. Bush Administration’s “Ownership Society” failed, and now homeownership rates are back where they were in the mid-’90s. But as wealth has further concentrated, the market for vacation homes has stayed strong. According to the National Association of Realtors, over 1 million vacation homes were sold in 2014. That’s 21 percent of total home sales, the highest share ever recorded. “Affluent households have greatly benefited from strong growth in the stock market in recent years,” the Association’s chief economist Lawrence Yun said, “and the steady rise in home prices has likely given them reassurance that real estate remains an attractive long-term investment.”