The title of Joshua Marston’s Maria, Full of Grace (2004) does far more than suggest a tone, outline a topic, or introduce a central character: it actually superimposes a theme not readily evident from the texture of the film itself.

Marston’s movie relates the story of María Álvarez, a pregnant Columbian teenager who quits her hometown job stripping thorns from roses to see what more life has to offer. She ends up working for a drug distributor, smuggling heroine into New York by filling her stomach with a few dozen plastic-wrapped boluses of the deadly substance. These pellets ride alongside her unborn baby, threatening immediate death to the child and mother should even one spill its contents into her bloodstream. Maria makes it to New York, manages to survive dealings with the dealers who receive her body’s contents, and ultimately decides to remain in the U.S. instead of returning home with her fellow drug mule. The film closes with the strong visual suggestion that, with endless possibilities before her in the States, María will manage to carve out a life free of provincial boredom and old family pressures.

No obviously religious materials help explain the film’s name, however. We do find María sitting inside a church for a few seconds early on in the film, and an even briefer shot later locates her beside a store window that sports a statue of the Virgin Mary, but no other overt symbolism attaches her to the Catholicism suggested by the title. Nor do any conversations about personal faith or her culture’s dominant religion appear to spur, thwart, or otherwise inform María’s actions. So why the allusion to the Ave Maria?

Maria is at one time or another “full of” any number of things that have no self-evident ties to the Divine. After getting fed up with small-town life, she fills herself with drugs, makes way for the baby that will fill her womb by depositing those drugs, and concludes by filling herself with dreams about life in America. Surely, the director does not mean to imply María is “full of grace” because full of drugs, and I also doubt that he (or most other modern directors) would infer that merely removing someone to American society somehow bestows on them a state of grace.

Which leaves us with one distinct possibility. The title’s reference to the Hail Mary prayer seems to suggest that this aptly named young woman is a kind of unchaste, modern Mother of God, one whose very pregnancy—and her decision to care for the child without the help of the boyfriend who offers her marriage—deserves a supernatural stamp of approval. A film which is already compelling as further evidence of our fallen world’s misogynistic tendencies, becomes unnecessarily confusing with the addition of a title implying that one who courageously chooses to shape her own path free of familial, friendly, or spiritual guidance is somehow analogous to the selfless, divinely appointed mother of Christ.