'Enough,'' a jarring thriller packed to the gills with cheap shocks, suggests the emergence of a new Hollywood subgenre: the male yuppie horror film. The unspoken premise behind it suggests that a new generation of cold young men has arisen who are so obsessed with fattening their portfolios and chiseling their abs that they have forgotten to grow souls. And yes, that premise probably contains a tiny grain of truth.

Out of this grain, however, the movie has conceived a caricature even more monstrous than Glenn Close's voracious Medusa in ''Fatal Attraction.'' On a certain tit-for-tat level, ''Enough'' might even be seen as a feminist revenge for the stereotyping in ''Fatal Attraction,'' even though both films were written and directed by men.

The movie, which opens today nationwide, also exploits an ugly undercurrent of class warfare. Its star, Jennifer Lopez, plays a spunky working-class woman suckered into marriage with a rich yuppie master of the universe who brutally abuses her. In the movie's climax, she faces down her husband in one-on-one combat, armed with brass knuckles and fortified by a crash course in martial arts.

Will honest working-class pluck and self-reliance triumph over spoiled upper-class privilege? You don't have to ask. Throughout, Ms. Lopez holds the screen in a star performance that has less to do with acting than with embodying a forceful, streetwise woman who stands up for herself.

The movie's yuppie monster, versions of which you may have already met in ''Sleeping With the Enemy'' and ''American Psycho,'' is a handsome, homicidal rageoholic and control freak named Mitch (Billy Campbell), who operates with an unlimited sense of personal entitlement. A successful contractor, he enters the life of Slim (Ms. Lopez), a tough-talking waitress, like a toxic Prince Charming and sweeps her off her feet in an elaborate scam cooked up with his best friend to portray himself as a rescuer. Virtually overnight, Slim leaves behind her daily grind of balancing trays and lands ecstatically in her prince's hand-picked palace.

The grindingly assaultive melodrama makes only token nods to realism. For a certified control freak, Mitch seems to be a preposterously impulsive purchaser of real estate.

Upon spotting his Southern California dream house, he knocks on the door, whips out a checkbook and without even looking inside makes the owner an offer he would be crazy to refuse. This grandiose gesture resonates later when Mitch harshly announces to his wife that he always gets what he wants, emphasizing the always.

After a period of seemingly perfect bliss, during which Slim has given birth to a darling little daughter, Gracie (Tessa Allen), signs of trouble appear when Mitch turns down his wife's offer to join him in the shower. In a movie that doesn't know the meaning of the word subtle, we immediately sense that he is grooming himself for an extramarital tryst. Some elementary cell-phone sleuthing reveals that he is having an affair.

But when Slim confronts Mitch, he is arrogantly unrepentant. Men and women are different, he declares. Although he loves Slim, he requires other women too.

Since he makes the money in the family, he adds, he gets to make the rules, and there's nothing she can do to stop him. When Slim threatens to walk out, Mitch viciously strikes her and warns that he will never let her or his daughter go. At this point, ''Enough'' becomes a chase movie in which Slim flees the house and eventually assumes another identity, moving first to Seattle, where she stays with Joe (Dan Futterman), a gentle ex-boyfriend, and then to Michigan. As she makes her way around the country, the movie purports to offer advice to battered wives. Most of it is very grim, and I wouldn't trust it for a second.

The movie also offers an explanation for Slim's choice of a husband. An adopted child, she tracks down her biological father in Seattle to ask him for financial help. He turns out to be just like Mitch, only 25 years older. As for Joe, who might have emerged as a hero in another version of the story, the movie baldly states that the gentle, handsome, nurturing friend wasn't enough of a man in bed to make Slim happy. Even Joe cheerfully admits it.

''Enough'' has a certain internal logic. Its wife-battering scenes, which had the preview audience gasping at their brutality, characterize the movie's head-banging aesthetic, if aesthetic is the right word. Through stealthy camera movements and an abrasively jumpy soundtrack, ''Enough'' does a better job than most movies of sustaining a mood of palpable physical menace, then confirming your worst fears. In a particularly harrowing scene, two thugs, hired by Mitch and posing as F.B.I. agents, methodically trash Joe's apartment while Slim and Gracie, hidden away, cower in terror.

In the end you have to wonder why the highly reputed director Michael Apted (''Coal Miner's Daughter'') and the gifted screenwriter Nicholas Kazan (''Reversal of Fortune'') chose to go slumming in territory like this. They must have been offered wads of money to do the dirty job.

''Enough'' is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned) for sexual situations, profanity and sickening scenes of domestic violence.