“Due process” has been much on the minds and even in the news in North America, as ordinary citizens grapple with the shock of a rights-trampling regime killing people in boats it can’t identify much less charge with a crime and with citizens and immigrants alike being snatched from the streets by masked, armed and brutish unofficial “police” in name only.

That’s what the Argentine drama “The Woman in the Line” is about, a country with a history of making people “disappear” leaving too much of the oppression apparatus of the state in place to ensure it never happens again.

Co-writer and director Benjamin Ávila’s generally gripping and engrossing drama never misses a step when we see a mother assaulted in a police raid that arrests her teen son — with no charges named and no tolerance for debate or questioning what the authorities can and cannot do.

“It’s a mistake! My kid’s a SAINT!” (in Spanish with English subtitles) is almost sure to be an overstatement. But where’s the due process when masked, armed goons bust in your house and slap you when you dare to protest this home invasion?

The film, “inspired by a true story,” takes liberties with that story, something bluntly acknowledged in the closing credits. We viewers are entitled to think the co-writers did their subject and their movie wrong by taking the tale in a much more conventional inside-and-outside prison melodramatic direction.

Natalia Oreiro of “I’m Gilda” and “Today We Fix the World” plays Andrea, a widowed mother of three shocked and seriously put-out when her tall, teen son Gustavo (Federico Heinrich) is dragged away, right in front of her eyes.

Andrea has a temper, which is not mollified by getting punched during the arrest, nor rebuffed by an efficious and cruel “system” that gives her no answers and insists on locking her kid up without so much as a word with him or a listing of charges.

She rages at internment functionaries and roars at guards and the other women in similar circumstances who complain when she cuts line or tosses a tantrum.

Her lawyer (Luis Campos) isn’t spared her fury.

Her mother, whom she asks to pick up her younger kids and take them home and her employer both get lies about what’s going on. She won’t tell friends, either. We suspect her embarrassed silence does her no favors.

The kid, when he finally calls, is more stoic. He hastily gives her a list of what he needs and hangs up.

Andrea finds her world upended and her rights circumscribed as she frantically cooks and packs for the kid and endures food-rummaging and strip searches from the guards. She’s in over her head, and this widowed real estate agent can’t help but notice that most everyone in line at this prison is a woman, and that they’re at best tolerant of each other when they aren’t elbowing their way past one another to get what they need or want.

Andrea snaps more than once. A fellow inmate steals her kid’s new shoes? She’s going after that guy’s mother.

An older woman (Amparo Noguera) whose nickname is “’22,’ like the madman,” tries to calm her and show her the rules and roles everyone must play. This 22 has lots of experience with this system and this visitation process and all the ways the state gets back at women in line who get out of line.

And another client of her lawyer, Alejo (Alberto Ammann) is also a calming influence, an inmate who knows this world and Gustavo’s risks and who calls her — repeatedly — just to reassure her about her son, and just to hear a friendly woman’s voice.

The way this story sets up, we figure these women will get over their stand offishness and organize either to demand due process and civil rights for their loved ones, or plot an escape. Suffice it to say the story turns more melodramatic than Hollywood far-fetched and violent.

Not every “turn” is accurate or as dramatically satisfying as this film promises. The more we learn about this case, the more conventional and less truthful the story becomes.

But Oreiro is a fierce presence at its heart, making Andrea an uncompromising hotheadwho fumes and pokes around, finds herself taking extraordinary risks and unable to control her temper even as she’s doing that.

And the story can’t help but move us, even as we wonder if would have been more moving had it hewed more closely to the facts.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, smoking, profanity

Cast: Natalia Oreiro, Federico Heinrich, Amparo Noguera and Alberto Ammann.

Credits: Directed by Benjamín Ávila, scripted by Benjamín Ávila and Marcelo Müller. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:45