A newly-single mother is forced out of her home, as a rival family brutally beats her, and murders her husband. Displaced, she flees to unfamiliar territory, homeless and barely able to watch over her three young children. Her efforts to put food on the table for her family are blocked at every turn by the hulking, scarfaced leader of a band of thugs who like to hang out near the area where she’s tried to stake out a hideaway. Meanwhile, that rival family, led by a half-blind silver-eyed matriarch, continues to stalk her and her children, intent on wiping them out entirely. The mother must somehow run all of these gauntlets and either learn to survive on her own or manage to get accepted into that rival family if she has any hope of raising her children.

That may sound like the pitch for a pretty intense crime thriller, or an intimate gangster piece about warring mob families. Believe it or not, it’s actually the basic outline of the conservation-minded nature documentary, The Last Lions.

The story arc, which feels very much like something that originated on a screenwriter’s laptop rather than a marsh in a remote corner of the Kalihari desert in Botswana, gives the film more suspense and emotional investment than one might expect from this kind of movie. One occasionally has to remind oneself that these are wild animals, no matter how neatly they fit — in appearance and in action — into cinematic archetypes.