“Old Stone,” a tough, bitter serving of straight-up naturalism, opens on a street and closes at the edge of the abyss. Between start and finish, it follows the nightmarish ordeals of a Chinese taxi driver, Lao Shi (Chen Gang), who struggles to do the right thing after hitting a motorcyclist. His first mistake is reporting the accident; his second is trying to help the bleeding victim instead of splitting. No good deed goes unpunished in this vision of contemporary China, a dog-eat-dog world in which the strong don’t just consume the weak, they also suck the marrow out of every last bone.  The Chinese-Canadian director Johnny Ma, making his featured debut, ably sets the dire scene and agitated mood right from the get-go. Even with some needless narrative zigzagging, the kind that’s turned into an art-film tic, “Old Stone” runs a fast, austere 80 minutes, which doesn’t give you much time or space to worry about Lao Shi or reflect on China’s sociopolitical reality. For the most part, Mr. Ma just pulls you along, keeping you close to Lao Shi with focused storytelling and agitated camerawork, creating a sense of intimacy that can border on the claustrophobic. You’re at first a bystander and, over time, an occasional, reluctant companion.  Shortly after the movie opens, Mr. Ma gets down to business on a jammed street scene bordering on the chaotic. A motorcyclist is on the ground bleeding, surrounded by a shouting, surging crowd that — as accusations ring out and fingers thrust and point — appears on the verge of becoming a mob. Lao Shi is the man apart, both visually and existentially: After calling in the accident to the police, he feverishly tries to decide what to do next as the crowd pushes around him and the fallen man. He ends up driving the motorcyclist to the hospital, whereupon he’s hit with one bill after another.  Lao Shi’s decency rapidly undoes him. He’s the victimizer (he did plow into the motorcyclist, though extenuating circumstances materialize), but he soon becomes the accident’s other victim. The police abuse him, as do the taxi company and the insurance company. The hospital makes him pay and pay again, as does the victim’s remote (emotionally, geographically) family. His wife, Mao Mao (Nai An), who runs a day care center out of their apartment — she’s preoccupied with opening a bigger business — grows to resent him. About the only place Lao Shi finds peace is in the hospital room where the comatose motorcyclist is bleeding him dry, one mechanically assisted breath at a time.  Mr. Ma paints a persuasively bleak scene that could use more psychological and philosophical nuance to go with its painstaking grimness. There’s more than a touch of the absurd in Lao Shi’s situation, most obvious when he’s with his victim, whose silence is a relief. Although the movie advances an obvious critique of contemporary China, a bureaucratic labyrinth from which there seems to be no escape, its title also suggests Albert Camus’s essay “The Myth of Sisyphus.” For Camus, Sisyphus is “the absurd hero,” condemned to search for meaning — to keep pushing uphill — in the total absence of meaning. “A face that toils so close to stones,” Camus writes, “is already stone itself!”  “Old Stone” is not rated. It is in Mandarin, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.  Stars Gang Chen, Nai An, Hongwei Wang, Zebin Zhang, Xue'er Luo  A version of this review appears in print on November 30, 2016, on page C4 of the New York edition with the headline: Compassion Is Expensive for an Honest Cabby. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Chen Gang plays a Chinese taxi driver trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare after he accidentally hits a motorcyclist.