Courtney Hunt's Frozen River, winner of the winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, opens the prestigious New Director/ New Films Series at MoMA. A taut thriller featuring the fine performance of Melissa Leo (21 Grams, Homocide: Life on the Street), Hunt's assured first film takes place in a desolate American landscape, an impoverished town in Upstate New York on the edge of a Mohonk reservation and the Canadian border.

Leo plays Ray Eddy, a working class mother of two who has been left by her husband days before Christmas. She lives in a dilapidated trailer with her two sons, works part time at a miserable Yankee Dollar store and has big dreams of a double-wide ready-built tract home, a dream thoroughly squashed with the disappearance of her spouse. He took the money, too.

Ray searches for the man and instead finds his green Dodge Spirit, in the possession of Lila (Misty Upham), an outsider even in her own community who lives in a trailer even worse than Ray's. Lila has a reputation: she's a smuggler. The seemingly ordinary car is a perfect conduit for taking illegal immigrants over the border -- a river of frozen ice.

The two women form a reluctant partnership. Lila knows the drill; Ray's white skin allows them safe passage. While they may complement each other, these women don't exactly like each other. Or the work. The risks are enormous: from traversing over a frozen river in a two thousand pound automobile, putting human cargo in the trunk of the car, ensuring their contacts don't rip them off (because they certainly try) and then, the equally long return trip, delivering their silent passengers to an unsavory motel on the other side. Add sub zero temperatures, winter storms, watchful state troopers, and Pakistani passengers with mysterious baggage, and each crossing is a compressed horror film in itself. The money, of course, is good.

Ray is not always a particularly likable character. Times are hard, and she's also hard; her body, itself, is lean and wiry, tattooed. Nor are Ray's viewpoints palatable; her condescending treatment of Lila and Native Americans certainly is not endearing, let alone what she has to say about Pakastanis. Leo, however, is astonishingly good, making this complex character live and breathe in a performance reminiscent of Vera Farmiga in another spare, female-directed independent film, Down to the Bone.

Despite and because of her flaws, Ray earns our sympathy. The same can be said for Upton's Lila, a tough character with a soft spoken voice who has a sad story of her own. With Frozen River, Hunt creates two remarkable roles and a fascinating situation. With every passage over the frozen river, the relationship between the two women develops, as does our relationship with the characters. The suspense steadily builds. The ice has to crack, but the ending is not clear until the final frame.

ND/NF 2008 screenings of Frozen River:

• Wed Mar 26: 7:00pm (The Museum of Modern Art)
• Thu Mar 27: 6:15pm (Walter Reade Theater)