Starring Naomi Watts and Annette Bening. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, June 11, at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas

Female characters don’t come much more richly painted than they do in Rodrigo Garcí­a’s nuanced Mother and Child. In fact, it’s safe to say you’ve never met any women quite like them in a movie.

The Colombian-born director, using a similar episodic style to Alejandro González Iñárritu’s (who exec produces), interweaves the intimate stories of three people affected by adoption.

A credibly dowdy Annette Bening plays Karen, a bitterly lonely physiotherapist haunted by the baby she gave up at 14. She’s put a hard shell around herself, and is so cut off she practically acts hostile when a mild-mannered coworker (an equally deglammed Jimmy Smits) tries to befriend her.

Even more compelling is Naomi Watts’s corporate lawyer, Elizabeth, an ice woman who provocatively announces to her new boss, the beautifully restrained Samuel L. Jackson: “Many women find me threatening. I’m not part of the sisterhood.” Elizabeth seduces for the sport of it: watch her neatly fold her panties and place them in another woman’s drawer after one roll in the hay. But like Karen, she has a hole inside her—in this case, she was adopted and has never found her real mother.

The third character comes the closest to conventional in Lucy (Kerry Washington), a woman who’s turned to adoption because she can’t conceive, but finds herself facing gruelling interviews with a demanding mother-to-be and a husband who’s wavering on the idea.

By the final act, Garcí­a works a little too hard to tie the stories of the trio together. But who cares? In this movie, the pleasure comes from watching the unexpected turns each character takes. Karen is convinced her elderly, bedridden mother resents her for ruining her life with a teen pregnancy. But like the other relationships here, things are much more complicated than they seem. Karen visibly flinches whenever the house cleaner brings her kid to work, but her mother looks longingly at that little girl. Can it be that Karen’s mother, too, grieves the loss of the unknown child and the happiness it might have brought her daughter?

Nothing is straightforward, and Garcí­a reveals the bond between mother and child so sappily spelled out in the title to be as complex and torturously fraught as it is undeniable.