Javier (Javier Gutiérrez), the graying ad executive and status-conscious sociopath at the center of David and Àlex Pastor’s sardonic noir “The Occupant,” once made a fortune convincing people that perfection could be theirs for the cost of a fridge. Alas, Javier’s decades-old tagline — “The life you deserve!” — no longer sells, according to his humiliating job interview with two hip marketers who make him feel as musty as the bottom of a work space kombucha keg. When Javier is forced to downsize his family from luxury digs back to a small apartment in a blue collar corner of Barcelona, his aspirational mantra mutates into malevolence toward the up-and-coming young patriarch Tomás (Mario Casas), who’s taken over the lease without realizing that the former resident still has a key to let himself in to use the bathroom (and worse).

“The Occupant,” streaming on Netflix, aims to refresh the trashy ’90s stalker thriller. The Pastor brothers have kept the cold blue tinting and naïve wives, but swapped out the retrograde crazy ladies hellbent on stealing babies, husbands and haircuts for Gutiérrez’s dishwatery corporate striver. Today’s cultural battlefield has shifted from sexual desire to class warfare, a topic so international, immediate, and, thanks to “Parasite,” Oscar-anointed, that Netflix trusts there’s an audience for this middling melodrama.

Instead of pitting have-nots against haves, the script skims along the curdled upper layer of entitlement. Javier — a hollow vessel who watched TV for the commercials — is so obsessed with superficial success that he pressures his chubby teen son to jog until he pukes. Yet, the film waves off character development and merely side-eyes its frustrations with capitalism in its rush to convince us that this dullard is in fact a supervillain who is game to manipulate, maim and poison for a marble firepit. “The Occupant” gets eyebrow-raisingly nasty without ever getting interesting. If Javier put as much effort into his portfolio as he does into evil, he’d have a sports car for every day of the week. Maybe then, his story would have somewhere to go.

The Occupant

Not rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes.