Ozarks teenager Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is determined to locate her fugitive father in Debra Granik's gritty thriller Winter's Bone. (Sebastian Mlynarski/Maple Pictures)

There are some films where the evocation of place and time is stronger than the story. That’s the case with Winter’s Bone, this year’s winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

Director Debra Granik's bleak drama is about a teenage girl's search for her fugitive father.

Director Debra Granik’s bleak drama, based on Daniel Woodrell’s highly praised 2006 novel, is about a teenage girl’s search for her fugitive father. But far more powerful than its murky plot is the movie’s recreation of life in the modern-day Ozarks — an impoverished, colour-drained world of hard-faced women and haggard, wiry men, where moonshine and illegal stills have been replaced by cocaine and meth labs.

Jessup Dolly ran one of those labs and he’s wanted both by the law and by his family. When his oldest daughter, 17-year-old Ree (Jennifer Lawrence), learns that her missing pa put up their log house and acreage as his bail bond against a forthcoming court appearance, she tenaciously sets out to track him down.

Ree really has no choice. With a catatonic mother and two younger siblings to care for — as well as winter coming on — she can’t afford to lose the family home. But it means that she has to prise the truth about Jessup’s whereabouts from a closed community where blood ties go hand in hand with old grievances and codes of silence. Granik gives us one of the grimmest pictures of American rural rot since Sam Shepard’s Buried Child.

Ree is stonewalled, misled and threatened at every turn, even by her own kin. Finally, her cokehead uncle, Teardrop (a gaunt, forbidding John Hawkes), relents and helps her discover the fate of her father. It means going up against the area’s drug lord, Thump Milton (Ronnie Hall), a kind of hillbilly godfather, and his brutal wife, Merab (Dale Dickey), who serves as his gatekeeper. Strong women abound in this secretive society, even though they remain under the thumb of their no-account menfolk.

Winter’s Bone shares themes, plot points (drug addiction, a bitter winter) and even part of its title with Granik’s previous film, 2004’s Down to the Bone. Whereas that stark tale was an acting showcase for the superb Vera Farmiga, this one spotlights newcomer Lawrence. The 19-year-old Kentucky actress, her feline face framed by flyaway hair, delivers a tough, intelligent performance that begs inevitable comparisons with last year’s Sundance debutante, Gabourey Sidibe of Precious.

Ree receives reluctant help from her Uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes). (Sebastian Mlynarski/Maple Pictures)

Both play poor but resilient young women, but the similarities end there. Unlike Sidibe’s bullied teenager, Lawrence’s Ree doesn’t need to acquire self-confidence — she has a spine of steel from the outset. It may be bred in the bone — “bread and buttered,” as Ree puts it colloquially — or a function of her harsh environment, but this scrappy child of the Ozarks has a survivor’s instincts. She prepares the younger Dollys for a hungry winter by teaching them to shoot, skin and gut squirrels, displaying the kind of cool pragmatism you don’t usually associate with 17-year-old girls. If she harbours any adolescent dreams, it’s to join the army. In one of her few moments of abstraction, she slips into the local high school gym to watch the Junior ROTC go through their drills.

Not all of Winter’s Bone is dark. There’s a warm episode in which Ree, looking for her father’s ex-lover, comes upon a birthday party where a lively roots-music jam is in progress. It reminds you of the classic Dueling Banjos interlude in Deliverance, only here we’re transported by the wistful singing of Ozarks folklorist Marideth Sisco. Then there are the scenes with Ree’s married school friend Gail, a.k.a. Sweet Pea (Lauren Sweetser), who isn’t afraid to defy her loutish husband. She offers a glimmer of hope that the next generation of mountain women won’t defer to their men.

Still, the overriding mood is wintery. The picture was actually filmed in the Missouri part of the Ozarks and cinematographer Michael McDonough, who also shot Down to the Bone, lingers on landscapes of leafless trees, dead grass and yards littered with rusted machinery. At times, this barren world doesn’t seem that far removed from the post-apocalyptic U.S. of The Road. (Strengthening the impression is the fact that Garret Dillahunt, who played one of the scary characters in that picture, appears here as an ambivalent sheriff.)

It feels odd to mention Avatar when reviewing a film like Winter’s Bone, but I was reminded of how, when James Cameron’s 3-D fantasy premiered, there were viewers who claimed to be depressed because they wanted to live on the fairy-tale planet of Pandora. Conversely, you leave this movie relieved that you don’t dwell in its grey, sick world. But you suspect that, despite some grotesque touches, it isn't purely fiction. Blowing through Granik’s vision of an insular, drug-ravaged American backwoods is the bone-chilling wind of truth.

Winter’s Bone opens in Toronto on June 18 and in Montreal and Vancouver on June 25.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC News.