A glance at the headlines from Europe, the news from Washington or this month's bills will confirm that we live in an age of debt.

Debt, a concept at once straightforward and almost metaphysically complex, is a source of personal, national and global anxiety, and forms a link between the individual and the worldwide economic system.

It also extends far beyond the domain of money, into the realms of psychology, morality and religion. "We owe God a death," says Feeble in "Henry IV, Part 2," and in the meantime what we owe ourselves, our friends, our children, our country and our species is beyond counting.

The Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood defines the subject of her book "Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth" — which originated as the 2008 Massey Lectures in Toronto — as "one of the most worrisome and puzzling things I know: that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force."

Jennifer Baichwal's documentary, also titled "Payback" and inspired by Atwood's book (and not to be confused with the Mel Gibson thriller), tries to keep up with that writer's agile mind and to flesh out some of her ideas in concrete images and specific stories.

With Atwood herself on hand to provide commentary and intellectual guidance, Baichwal ("Manufactured Landscapes," "Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles") contemplates a blood feud in northern Albania, the terrible working conditions of tomato pickers in Florida and the aftermath of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Her interview subjects include participants and witnesses, and also a smattering of experts, among them the economist Raj Patel, the ecologist William Rees and the religion scholar Karen Armstrong, who wrote "A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam."

The testimony is often fascinating, and the stories are gripping, in particular the grim Albanian situation, a land dispute between neighbors bound up in a deep and ancient code of honor and vengeance.

But the film never provides a conceptual framework that would allow the viewer to see this vendetta, the poisoning of the Gulf and the virtual enslavement of farm workers as meaningful instances of the same thing.

Worse, the examples seem arbitrary, given the urgency and ubiquity of the film's major theme in contemporary life.