This competent but somewhat predictable drama, which strobes between settings in Mexico and Texas, emerged two years ago under the title The Absence of Eden to very little fanfare or even much notice beyond the festival circuit. It’s almost certainly getting a release now here in the UK because its lead, Zoe Saldaña, is up for an Academy Award for Emilia Pérez in which, like this one, she plays a Mexican woman.

Here Saldaña is a strip club employee named Esmee on the run to El Norte after she kills a client, so this at least shows off her range a bit. As it happens, this was also directed and co-written by Saldaña’s real-life husband, Italian film-maker Marco Perego, who certainly ensures the missus is beautifully lit in every shot and gets a big climactic emotional speech near the end. Not that it’s possible to take a bad shot of Saldaña, even when she’s wearing drab normie clothes and barely a lick of makeup.

As Esmee’s journey progresses from Mexico to the US where she must survive sexual harassment and worse, and ends up looking after a little girl whose mother gets lost along the way, the other half of the film focuses on the travails of ICE agent Shipp (Garrett Hedlund), a clenched up cop who falls in love with schoolteacher Yadira (Adria Arjona, the breakout star of Richard Linklater’s Hit Man). By inches, the two storylines eventually converge, and all the lead actors are pretty good and well-enough directed by Perego. But there’s a grim, hopeless flatness about the script’s tragedy-flecked momentum, timely enough these days but not exactly moving the conversation along. Kudos is due, however, to whoever trained the beautiful black coyote in a key scene near the end.

• Beyond the Borders is on digital platforms from 10 February.