Quentin Tarantino says Courtney Hunt’s much-awarded first feature is “the most exciting thriller I’ve seen this year”.

It isn’t actually a thriller at all, though it has a few thrillerish elements, but a sadly accurate, brilliantly played treatise on poverty and need.

Its location is the bleak, wintry borderland between America and Canada, where a Mohawk reservation is sited and the local police are on the look-out for drunks and smugglers.

Its leading characters are Ray (Melissa Leo), whose husband has decamped with the money she was saving up to buy a better trailer, and Lila (Misty Upham), a younger Mohawk single mother whose stepmother has taken her baby away from her.

Both women are in severe trouble. Ray has a part-time job that doesn’t pay her debts, but still insists her teenage son (Mark Boone Jr) attends school.

Lila is searching for her baby and attempting to get the money to look after her by any means available.

The two meet when she steals Ray’s old car, hoping to sell it for $2,000.

People-smuggling emerges as the only answer for both — and there are plenty of shady characters around to facilitate their involvement.

The two women use the car to drive precariously across the frozen river that separates the two countries with Pakistani or Chinese illegal immigrants in the boot.

They form a kind of semi-hostile bond — needs must, even if Ray is ashamed of herself.

Both a ravaged-looking Leo and Upham don’t seem like actors at all, but real and metaphorically bleeding women near the bottom of the pile.

The rest of the cast, especially Boone as Ray’s boy, acts with a naturalness that speaks of good direction as well as talent.

If you think this might be a depressing movie, you have Tarantino’s quote that it “took his breath away” to reassure you.

Everything about the film looks and feels authentic, from the desolate landscape dotted with trailers and fast-food joints to the people who populate a borderland that offers none of them much hope.