Maria is a pretty 17-year-old living in Colombia. Her profession serves as a quick visual metaphor for the plight of exploited workforces everywhere — it's her job to strip the thorns from locally gathered roses destined to be sent to more affluent locales. Maria has a boyfriend who doesn't really love her (though he managed to knock her up), a boss who specializes in loud, callous dehumanization, and a family — including a sister with a child of her own — that doubtless loves her, but still demands her money.

The set-up is programmatic, and it's hard to be very surprised when the charming, raffish young dude who catches Maria's eye at a nightclub turns out to have an ulterior motive for making friends with her. He's in the business of recruiting mules, human drug carriers, for trips to the United States. For Maria, the dangers of the journey are less expensive than the fabulous cash reward that's promised to her on its completion — enough to buy medicine for her nephew and breathing room for herself.

What's very savvy about writer/director Joshua Marston’s approach to the material is his insistence on narrating from Maria's point of view. As Maria, Catalina Sandino Moreno, gives an un-showy, self-possessed performance that reveals much about character. The film doesn't argue that she has no choice but to turn to a life of crime. Rather, it demonstrates what she sees with her own imperfect vision: that it's the only apparent choice that will salvage her sense of pride and self-reliance. And because the film demands that the viewer identify with her, the details of the preparations for her flight to New York are all the more fascinating and alarming. She will swallow pellets, actually plastic capsules about the size of a chocolate candy egg and bulging with heroin, many dozens of them. If she is caught by police, she will go to prison. If any of the little magic pellets go missing, her family will be tortured and murdered. And if one of them breaks inside her body, she will die.

So there's a real sense of visceral disgust here, and the long scene that takes place on board Maria's plane flight to America is by some margin the most nerve-racking thing I've watched lately. (This guy Marston, he’s good.) The tension comes because the film has handled its characters gently and with optimism. If I have a complaint, it’s that it may finally feel a little too optimistic. The story treads awfully close to the abyss to pull away so quickly and without grave repercussions for its characters. After it was over, I joked that I couldn't wait to see the half-hour TV sitcom spin-off. And then I thought, hmm, that actually wouldn't be a terrible idea. If Maria Full of Grace isn’t necessarily a work of great originality or gritty realism, it's intelligent and unpatronizing and fulfills its ambitions — it depicts a world full of moments of squalor and terror, but one that still holds the promise of actual beauty, if you can keep your head out of the shit long enough to find where beauty lives.

In this way, it compares favorably to stuff like Lilya 4-Ever and Requiem For a Dream, films of great outrage created by skilled filmmakers who seek out the most horrific, gut-punching means of expression, seemingly eager to rub your nose in depictions of people being exploited like you're a bad dog. I think both Lilya 4-Ever and Requiem are very good films, but Marston is eager to have the viewer share Maria’s experience, not be revolted by it or even judge it. And because Maria stands in for a whole class of quietly desperate people who would be hard-pressed to make it into the U.S. through legitimate channels, and therefore take matters into their own hands, it could rightly be described as a political film. As such, Maria Full of Grace may be not just a very good movie, but also an important contribution to the body of work dealing with the experiences of immigrants in America.