“Scrap Heaven,” a new Japanese film opening today at the Pioneer Theater, could be described as taking place in Chuck Palahniuk’s Tokyo.

As in the romantic nihilist author’s own novels “Fight Club” and “Choke,” the characters in “Scrap Heaven” come equipped with comatose parents, profound physical handicaps, barely satiable desires, and a building rage against the dehumanizing mechanisms of modern life.

Shingo (Ryo Kase), an overworked, yet underutilized, deskbound rookie cop, and Tetsu (Joe Odagiri), a confrontational free spirit who cleans toilets for a living, share a polarized Tyler Durden-esque duality. Saki (Kuriyama Chiaki), the girl who randomly enters their lives, could pass for any one of Mr. Palahniuk’s expressionless femme fatales.

After the three are collectively traumatized in a bloody hostage crisis, Tetsu persuades Shingo to partner in a clandestine service offering a taste of payback for outraged people too timid to take elaborate and illegal vengeance. As their revenge conceits grow more risky and imaginative (“Excrement Fouls Beauty Pageant,” screams a newspaper headline following an early escapade), the men’s relationship becomes increasingly divisive. It’s clear half way through the film that “Scrap Heaven” is hurtling headlong into betrayal and a bloodbath.

It’s also clear that in spite of all manner of trendy modernist cinematic trickery, writer/director Sang-Il Lee is a gifted visual stylist. The film’s grimy surfaces, cluttered offices, and antiseptic shopping centers are captured with unusual compositional intelligence. But Mr. Lee’s initially rote characters also grow as “Scrap Heaven” goes on. Rather than giving in to the filmmaking equivalent of the base instincts that hobble his protagonists, Mr. Lee measures scenes by his actors’ needs as much as his audience’s.