An airport security guard finds her life upended by a sketchy/flirty pixie in green hair and fingernails in “Green Night,” a Chinese romantic thriller starring Fan Bingbing that gives international exposure to Ms. Trouble in Green, Korean starlet Lee Joo-young.

Our heroine is one of those nameless global functionaries with a metal detector wand who checks you as you enter the airport, in this case in Seoul, South Korea.

The short young women in green sets off her detector, but protests to her boss that there’s something in the passenger’s shoe fall on deaf ears. Green girl “goes through here every week,” after all.

There’s a red flag. When the young woman promptly ditches her shoes and walks off barefooted, there’s another.

Later, they have another encounter, this time missing the bus in the airport parking lot. Wait, don’t you have to clear security for OUTgoing flights?

The flirtation that might have disarmed a less duty-bound Korean version of a Homeland Security agent pops up again.

“Are you Chinese? You owe me a pair of shoes.”

There’s nothing for it but to bring her to the guard’s Spartan airport-adjecent apartment, where several things are established. The girl is indeed a drug runner. “Your boss” knows this comes out, but only after guard Jingxia has called to alert him. Those bruises and that scratch on the Chinese woman’s face? Her estranged husband gave her those, the church-going creep who called her landlord and told him she was moving back in with him, so that he’d cut off her water.

It’s going to take money to get out of this marriage and this work/citizenship trap, and the Chinese-Korean figures the Korean drug mule is the solution. They’ll make the delivery and split the take.

Thus begins an odyssey through the bowels of Seoul, with violence and threats so dire they reluctantly wind up at her husband’s (Kim Young-ho) over-his-restaurant apartment. It’s not like the violence will end there.

There are plenty of Western versions of this sort of “life upended for a day or two by a manic pixie stranger” plot (“Something Wild,” “After Hours,” etc.). But this is no “Desperately Seeking Susan” comedy.

Her dizzy unnamed partner may not know where the drugs came from, exactly. Can Jingxia really get through this predicament, score some cash and escape her abusive Christian husband by taking the stranger’s advice and letting “it all boil down to luck” (in Korean and Mandarin Chinese, with English subtitles)? And might there be a mutual attraction that they have a spare moment to act on?

Fan Bingbing has been an international star for over a decade, with a “Resident Evil” and “X-Men” installment on her filmography, along with “The King’s Daughter,” “The 355,” “The Meg” and “I Am Not Madame Bovary”

Here, she’s playing a not-wholly passive participant in her own life, struggling to avoid confrontations, emboldened by desperation, peril and her new spirit guide in green. Her performance has nuance as her character’s journey has hope in it, but feels incomplete.

Lee Joo-young (“Maggie”) isn’t quite playing the manic pixie dream girl of Hollywood cliches. Her protagonist is light-hearted for a drug mule, and forward. She makes an effort to get what she wants and when someone is threatened, she’s tiny but tough enough to take action. Lee and her character are interesting enough to steal the picture, but that’s not allowed.

Director and co-writer Han Shuai (“Summer Blur”) lays on the homo-erotica right up to the moment when she abandons it. The violent people and violent world Jingxia has gotten mixed-up in move to the fore, perhaps making this Chinese thriller more palatable to Chinese audiences.

That makes one consider the Chinese censor-approved messaging, about the dangerous plight of “mail order brides” when they leave China for men they do not know. Korean corruption at all levels of law enforcment and the violence there can smell like Chinese agitprop.

“Green Night” plays, but mostly in fits and starts. It’s immersive enough, luring us into this world and fearing for our heroines’ safety. But the abrupt shifts in focus make one wish Han Shuai had taken some more crowd-pleasing course, or gone all-in on the darkness of this underworld an out-of-her-element ex-pat finds herself in.

Cast: Fan Bingbing, Lee Joo-young, Kim Min-gui and Kim Young-ho.

Credits: Directed by Han Shuai, scripted by Han Shuai and Lei Sheng. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:32