The sisters of Mustang (Cohen Media Group)

Imagine you have a young friend from conservative rural Turkey. Funny that, because her modishly off-kilter beauty looks more like what you’d see in a Paris modeling studio. Your friend is flirty and flighty, but she conceals something that you’d never mess with: stone courage and a will of fine metal. Does she tell fibs? Sure. But if you were in trouble you’d want her on your side.

Now imagine this friend as Mustang, France’s 2015 submission for the foreign language-film Oscar, directed by Deniz Ergüven and co-written by Ergüven and Alice Winocour (director of the fine thriller Maryland). Like your pal, Mustang contains facets that sometimes seem to face off against each other. But the movie arcs toward high-stakes dramatic tension so forcefully that you can’t resist its power. When talent, spirit, and, yes, beauty cast their spell, you’ll be able to overlook your friend’s annoying giggles and exaggerations.

On Turkey’s remote Black Sea coast, five willowy, long-haired young sisters celebrate the last day of school. They hop on the shoulders of male classmates and plunge into the sea for an impromptu chicken fight. The camera whirls, the girls shriek, and manes fly dizzyingly free—until they arrive home and their grandmother rages at their shameless immodesty: “You’re pleasuring yourselves on boys’ necks!” From now on, they’ll be locked up. Watched. The girls’ home will become their prison and something even worse.

Presumably Mustang condemns men’s oppression of women, but in some ways it barely feels political. The nubile leads bubble with sensual physicality. Cuddling in their undies, playing coltish games, and cutting deliriously loose to attend a forbidden soccer game, these young women overflow with irrepressible sensual energy, choreographed with French insouciance. No wonder their guardians, the grandmother and a dour uncle, seem so afraid of them. Granny simpers that the girls need to be protected from disgrace for their own good; it’s hard to tell what impulse lies behind Uncle Erol’s cold stare.

Surprising comic bursts buoy the mood, although the laughs don’t last long. Granny and Uncle dress their charges in shapeless sacks and install bars on their bedroom windows. Hungry for any kind of freedom, the cooped-up girls take risks that sometimes don’t feel plausible. Rounds of stilted social calls launch a series of arranged marriages that begin to separate the girls one by one. The sisters handle their predicaments with wisecracks and defiance, but a foul family secret sets off a hopeless act, heightening the sense of a noose pulling tighter.

Pressure finally blows on the night of the third forced marriage. When the lumpish groom and his family arrive to collect their child bride, the two youngest girls take a desperate step. Rage and violence follow. Shot in a wild, drawn-out whirl, this nighttime confrontation streamlines the film’s energy and takes it to The Night of the Hunter level of darkness.

After such a dizzy peak, the story grows stronger and more stripped-down, with a tightened focus on the youngest child, Lale (Gunes Sensoy). She has a knack for making staunch allies and daring, sometimes daffy escapes. Sensoy flawlessly plays a resolute kid who outwits menacing adults but also yearns to laugh and play like a nine-year-old. Her earthy performance steadies the movie and invests us in Lale’s fate.

With Mustang, director Ergüven draws sex appeal, glee, fear, and profound sadness together in ways that do not always feel exactly authentic. They feel right, though. Just as we would with our wayward friend, we let the filmmaker work her magic, overlooking the film’s flaws—in fact, liking it even better because of them. When you’re a risk taker you can get away with a lot.