The business model of protagonist Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike) is as innovative as it is unscrupulous.

With the help of a corrupt doctor, she has a court award her guardianship of supposedly senile seniors. Her care service is not about the needs of the elderly, but about enriching herself from them. Even before the seniors fully understand what is happening to them, they are put into a prison-like home that shields them even from their relatives. Meanwhile, Marla is already selling their house and farm and taking the profit as a generous salary.

Eloquent and always perfectly styled, she is the picture of a bourgeois "self-made woman". With this demeanor and a lot of hypocrisy, she wins over the local judge time and again, even in the face of lawsuits from desperate relatives. Afterwards, in the spinning class, she also gets the last out of herself in order to get the last out of others. It gets really interesting when she morally justifies her inhuman actions to herself and others. She does this by referring to patriarchy. The exploitation of women in this society is for her the justification to become an exploiter herself, also against other women. Thus, her character is an object lesson in bourgeois feminism: the liberation of women is degraded to a feminine "me, me, me!". On the other hand, her character also shatters patriarchal role models by showing her as a calculating and brutal woman. But by using these qualities as she does, she is no good as an identification figure.

Marla's business success is only interrupted by the fact that one day she obtains guardianship for the mother of mafia boss Roman Lunyov (Peter Dinklage). The latter, in turn, is not at all pleased that his mother is being shielded from his visits in a retirement home and pulls out all the levers to restore normality. Although both seem very different at first glance, they have a lot in common. Both stand for unrestrained enrichment at the expense of others, in her case in legal ways, in his case in illegal ones. Marla herself also has a clear view of the class society within which she wants to side with the exploiters: "Fairness is cynicism by rich people to keep the others in poverty."

Overall, the film is an entertaining critique on the poisoned promise of succes in contemporary capitalism. The whole thing is told in an interesting way, as the protagonist repeatedly invites the viewer to identify with her, but he absolutely has to deny her this.