Jun Geng’s Free and Easy tells the tale of an economically depressed and seemingly, mostly forgotten, northeast Chinese town, and the different grifters whose lots get thrown in together by circumstance or force of personality. Free and Easy’s story plays out akin to a Coen Brothers film: everyone’s got some kind of hustle, even the well-meaning. Also, like a film from the Coens, sooner or later there’s a body to deal with.

The script, by Liu Bing Feng and Yuha Geng Jun, gives each character caught up in this mess time to show their individual quirks and to let their guards down, and that’s needed for a story like this to work. While it is at its heart a story of confidence men and their marks, it’s also a story about scraping by any way you can, and how the influence of modernization and ultimately, capitalism, has left the rural parts of China behind.