Of all the recent movies to tackle the terrifying issue of human trafficking (including the crude and manipulative “Trade” and the eerily calm and cynical “Holly”), none has evoked the anxiety, despair, or sheer outrage to be found in “Blind Mountain,” which opens tomorrow at Film Forum. The film’s explosive climax drew spontaneous emotional outbursts from audiences during its premiere at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, and it came as no surprise when reports surfaced that Chinese officials forced the director, Li Yang, to make several last-minute changes to the film, which, on the eve of the Beijing Olympics, paints a less-than-encouraging portrait of the nation.

Set in the early 1990s, “Blind Mountain” unfolds so quickly and with such brutal assuredness that we never question the authenticity of the predicament into which young Bai Xuemei (Huang Lu) is tossed. Xuemei is a bright and penniless college graduate in need of a job. Unable to find work in the city, Xuemei is ecstatic when a young woman around her age tells her about a possible position selling medical supplies to citizens living in the country’s northern mountain region.

As the two women set out with an older man in a business suit, there’s something euphoric in Xuemei’s eyes, the palpable excitement of a young woman on an adventure to a paycheck. Better still, her colleagues tell her that these rural laborers seem eager to make a purchase. Xuemei laughs and takes a sip of water. She awakes hours later on a bed, clutching her stomach. In mere seconds she has surmised the betrayal: Her co-workers are nowhere to be found, her money and I.D. have been stolen, and a gangly and grimy middle-age local named Degui (Yang Youan) informs her that she isn’t going anywhere — he’s paid $7,000 for her to be his wife.

It’s a shocking turn of events to be sure, but what’s most unsettling about “Blind Mountain” is not that a man would want to buy himself a young sex slave, but that his family and his community would be so complicit in the crime. Degui, with the help of his parents and others in this remote, uneducated village, quickly picks up Xuemei and locks her in her new bedroom. She refuses for weeks to talk to her “husband” or her in-laws, but they simply wait her out, and the weeks become months. When she refuses the sexual advances of her captor, Degui’s parents hold her down as he tries to impregnate her with a son — another income-generating male for this impoverished clan.

As a frantic Xuemei searches desperately for a way to escape, “Blind Mountain” becomes a horror film based less in violence than in logic. She tries to run away, tries to plead with other locals for help, tries to mail letters home. She even prostitutes herself in an effort to earn bribe money. But at every turn, Xuemei finds herself back where she started.

What sets the unwitting heroine of “Blind Mountain” apart is the intensity and intellect that Ms. Huang brings to the part, portraying Xuemei as a woman perfectly capable of fighting back against her attackers, but also knowing when it’s smarter to play the part of the docile prisoner. In one demoralizing scene, we realize there are many women in this village just like Xuemei, who have been doing just that for years — playing the part of the domestic servant to avoid the beatings, rapes, and cruelty, and praying for the day when their fates might change. The fact that the illiterate, uneducated villagers can outwit Xuemei thanks to their isolated location and the corruption of the regional government makes her plight that much more tragic.

It’s a rare thing, to encounter a movie so overflowing with outrage, so unflinching in its depiction of an injustice. In modern America, such examinations seem reserved for documentaries. But in China, Mr. Li has already proved that by mixing fact with fiction, one can concoct a far more convincing polemic. With his 2003 debut, “Blind Shaft,” the director fictionalized true-life accounts of criminality in the Chinese mining industry. Now, with “Blind Mountain,” he has cut through an issue that is yet more deplorable and unsettling.

As we begin to realize that Xuemei’s confinement is absolute, the last of the many blows in “Blind Mountain” does not so much concern her as it does the audience. By focusing so intently on her attempt to escape, we have lost sight of the steady obliteration of her spirit — how this experience has not only robbed her pride and her innocence, but also the sparkle in her eye that enticed us during the film’s opening scenes. Mr. Li pushes this theme to the breaking point, suggesting that her captors have already won, and that regardless of whether Xuemei ever wins her freedom, they have taken from her all there was to take.

ssnyder@nysun.com

Through March 25 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).