The odd-couple leads of Frozen River (2008) quickly forge a close bond unburdened by the emotional nuisances of friendship. Shared financial despair brings them together. Part-time discount-store clerk Ray (Melissa Leo) has been carefully saving money for a nicer trailer for her family to live in, but before the film opens her reckless gambler husband skips town with all the cash, leaving Ray a single mother to two sons, 5-year-old Ricky (James Reilly) and 15-year-old T.J. (Charlie McDermott), she can basically only afford to feed meals of popcorn and Tang. Bingo-parlor employee Lila (Misty Upham) can barely subsist on her wages and can think of little besides getting back her not-even-a-year-old son, who was practically snatched from her by her mother-in-law after Lila’s husband died in an accident. (It’s not uncommon for Lila to perch somewhere discreetly in front of her ex-in-law’s house in the evenings, spending enough time trying to get a satisfying eyeful of her son that she’ll bring cans of Pringles with her in case she gets hungry.)

Ray and Lila cross paths at the bingo parlor, where Ray searches fruitlessly for a husband we know is long gone. He’s abandoned his car there, though, and just as Ray is giving up on her search, Lila is clambering into his car and driving away, figuring it was hers for the taking because the doors were unlocked and the keys were inside. After some tense back and forth — Ray has a gun at the ready and claims to not be afraid to use it — Lila manages to not only gain the upper-hand but sneakily gets Ray hip to a scheme she’s very familiar with but only sometimes partakes in on account of extremely bad eyesight. Lila knows some people running an immigrant-smuggling operation where drivers, under the cover of night, drive across the frozen-solid St. Lawrence River connecting Upstate New York’s North County and Canada. She wonders if Ray, whom she knows is cash-strapped, would be interested in being one of those drivers. Ray would rather not. But she’d also prefer not to turn down a gig that gets her more than a thousand dollars a trip when she can’t manage to convince her supervisor at the discount store to bring her on full-time in the meantime.

Melissa Leo in Frozen River.

Frozen River easily could, but never does, escalate into what we might categorize as a thriller, even if we’re made to be a little uneasy at the possibility of the pair’s getting caught, a tire unexpectedly sinking into the supposed-to-be-solid waters, or there being something potentially dangerous in the duffel bag being so closely guarded by a pair of clients. (Spoiler alert: there is not, and Ray’s racist presumption — those clients are Pakistani — that there probably is will quickly become something of a karmic lesson.) 

Writer-director Courtney Hunt, in her feature-directing debut, makes something largely free of pulled-from-headlines-style sensationalism, lurid details mostly confined to things like visual snatches of the mushrooming scum in Ray’s bathtub or the tramp stamp revealed when a coworker bends over. She seems to want to approximate what it’s like to do the kind of work Ray and Lila do: anxiety-inducing, hard, and not very good at getting rid of the hellish sense of financial precarity that plagues their lives even if it obviously alleviates many immediate monetary worries. Some stilted dialogue aside, Hunt efficiently simulates creating-from-experience believability. The cinematography, grainy and handheld-shaky and by Reed Romano, makes everything feel more unexposed and unrelenting, the sub-zero temperatures the characters shiver around in looking even more uninviting. 

Those around the women largely remain oblivious to what they’re doing. T.J. especially — so worried on behalf of his little brother’s future that he tries to refine unpersuasive quick-cash phone scams while threatening to drop out of high school — is angry at a mother so distracted for reasons he’s so distrustful of that he feels the need to precautionarily make some calls to ensure his sibling can open presents on Christmas morning. (At the top of his list to Santa is the new trailer the family had just been poised to get.) 

Misty Upham in Frozen River.

Ray and Lila don’t really get along. A lot of that has to do with Lila, who is Mohawk, having an instinctive distrust of white people, much less one whom she got off on a wrong foot with that doesn’t quickly correct after that. But they come to build what seems like some grudging respect for each other, and even some affection in the way experiencing something stressful together can foster. 

Upham and Leo in particular (she received her first Oscar nomination for her work) are excellent as women who self-protectively feign toughness while white-knuckling it through work they hope will help better the lives of what little family they have. Frozen River isn’t a stereotypical “issue movie,” not once invoking whatever arguments might be for or against immigration and border control. Instead it’s a kind of survival movie, casting no judgment on women living with the consequences of refusing to let their circumstances destroy them.