PREMIERE'S REVIEW (posted 7/21/08)

The romance of the famed Trans-Siberian Express gets a chilling 21st century makeover in director and co-writer Brad Anderson's new thriller. Roy (Woody Harrelson) and Jessie (Emily Mortimer) are an American couple taking the train from China, where they were doing missionary work, so Roy can indulge his love of trains. Train travel is no longer the sleek, sexy scene it was in Strangers on a Train or Shanghai Express. Their trip is punctuated by Chinese police and drug-sniffing dogs, tales of missing toes and torture, and a shady couple with a bag full of matryoshka dolls. Meanwhile, crooked Russian cop Grinko, played by Ben Kingsley, circles closer and closer as the two couples become hopelessly entangled. This is the new Russia — drugs, thugs, the Mafia, and the cops working together in desperation. Transsiberian's subtext speaks to the new reality of the Eastern bloc.

It's clear from the start that Roy and Jessie are having marital problems that aren't being helped from a long trip in close quarters, and that both the reason for their trip — "Roy's church, I mean our church," Jessie corrects herself in conversation — and the method of travel is merely a way to humor Roy. While Roy drinks with the locals and good-naturedly lectures her on the evils of smoking, she is drawn more and more to their new bunkmates, Abby (Kate Mara) and Carlos (Eduardo Noriega), a couple who were teaching in Japan. She sneaks looks at the pair as they have sex; Carlos catches her watching and amps up his seduction of Jessie, with carnivorous grins and a growing interest in her slowly revealed rough-and-tumble past.

Director and co-writer Brad Anderson, whose previous credits include the terrifying horror flick Session 9 and the love story Next Stop Wonderland, cranks up the chills as the drama unfolds like Carlos's Russian nesting dolls. Cinematographer Xavi Giménez adds to the anxiety with cramped, harshly lit scenes in blue tones similar to the ones in his last collaboration with Anderson, 2004's The Machinist. The juxtaposition of tight, close-up shots of the actors' faces and the huge trains and snowy expanses amps up the growing tension. This is one train that you shouldn't miss.

— Jenni Miller