If the concept of desperation could be rendered visually, it would look something like Claire Denis’ White Material. The urgent hopelessness of this dark and meaningful work is striking from the very start: from the opening images of flashlights frantically surveying a darkened series of rooms, while a nightmare score of strings quickly ramps up the tension, to the first scenes with Maria (Isabelle Huppert) trying to get back home, clinging with steel-willed determination to the back of an overstuffed bus traveling dusty African roads.

Home, for Maria, is a coffee plantation in this unnamed African nation. She has lived here all of her life, her son born here, and her entire identity based around belonging. Yet she clearly doesn’t. There are obviously many reasons for Denis to have cast Huppert, perhaps France’s greatest actor working today, in this role — but with her pale, freckled skin and red hair, as well as the delicate pale pink dress she wears throughout much of the first half of the movie, her striking visual contrast to those around her tells us as much about her place in this country as her performance.

Civil war is coming, and, fearing the violence sweeping the region, her workers flee. Maria is also told to vacate, by French military forces leaving the area by helicopter. She sneers at them, and calls them “dirty whites,” seemingly oblivious to the fact that most locals view her very much in the same terms. (“White Material” is a snide term used by those locals to refer to the often luxurious belongings of whites.) She’s not listening; she has a coffee crop to bring in, and no one, not the French military, frightened workers, her practical husband André (Christopher Lambert), her layabout of a son Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), or the famous and wounded rebel soldier (Isaach De Bankolé) hiding on her plantation are going to pull her off task.