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Kevin Kline as Ray

A streak of Catholic piety runs through the film, with its Latino context. Veronica notices that Adriana wears a holy medal of the Virgin Mary and asks if she prays to the Virgin; Adriana expresses faith in Mary's protection. Later, in a wrenching moment, Adriana prays to Jesus before a San Damiano crucifix on the wall over the bed at the Jersey base of operations to which she has been brought, begging the Lord to at least ensure that she is bought by someone kind.

Such a juxtaposition of the sacred and the obscene—the dissonant presence of the Syrian-style icon in this den of iniquity—is at least as old as The Godfather, in which decadent cultural Catholicism coexisted with remorseless racketeering. In Trade the contradiction is embodied in Manuelo (Marco Perez), a flunky who pauses at the sight of a large cross to make the sign of the cross while hustling captives on a forced march across the U.S.–Mexican border.

Later, a desperate character strikes at Manuelo's religiosity with an implicit threat of heavenly justice in a line that the studio publicity department most unwisely cribbed for the movie's tagline, "You'll Pay For This." In an even more crucial scene, the conflict of belief and self-interest comes to a head in a twist that may or may not be credible, but is definitely what would happen in a movie like this.

A closing title states that the CIA estimates that 50,000 to 100,000 victims of human trafficking are brought into the United States each year specifically as sex slaves. The number is so horrific it seems hard to credit—and, indeed, it's unclear where the figure comes from. It's strikingly different from the number in Landesman's "The Girls Next Door," which cites a 2003 CIA estimate that puts the figure of human trafficking into the U.S. (not just sex slaves, but all victims) at 18,000 to 20,000—only 18%–40% of the number claimed just for sex slaves in Trade. Further confusing matters, film publicity materials state that "Landesman estimates" the figure to be 100,000 "or more."

Adriana and her brother Jorge (Cesar Ramos)

In a blistering series of editorials questioning the credibility of Landesman's article, Slant.com editor Jack Shafer reveals that an earlier CIA estimate from 2002 did put the figure as high as 50,000 (though not, apparently, 50,000 to 100,000, let alone 100,000 "or more"). Only a year later, though, the CIA revised its estimate to the much lower 18,000 to 20,000. Landesman's article cites the lower figure; why does the film, based on the article, use and even inflate the higher number?

The sensationalism is unfortunate in part because it injects skepticism into what is a real and horrific crime. After seeing Trade, I called the director of perhaps the largest human trafficking rescue organization on the east coast, Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Newark's Refugee Resettlement and Human Trafficking. I learned that the Newark office has aided in the rescue of over 50 victims of human trafficking in the last 18 to 24 months. Apart from one case involving over a dozen victims from Africa who were working in a hair salon, all the rest—over 40 victims—were being held as sex slaves.

Catholic Charities corroborated a number of details envisioned in the film, describing how victims were lured with promises of work or kidnapped in some South American or African country, how they were raped by their captors before being farmed out to others, how they changed hands from country to country until arriving in the U.S.

At the same time, the program director stated the obvious: No one really has any idea of the scope of the problem, because it's such a hidden crime. If Kreuzpaintner's film raises awareness of this hidden crime, that's all to the good. But that's not enough. Trade needed to be the United 93 of the human trafficking crisis. It's closer to being the World Trade Center.

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