Monster Music & Movies

Reviews:

Journeyman television and movie director Brad Anderson can mine genuine discomfort from ordinary events. His 2001 Session 9 turned a cleaning crew working into a taut thriller, and "Sounds Like," his 2006 entry in Showtime’s "Masters of Horror" series, made acute hearing psychologically unsettling. His 2008 Transsiberian travels down even more mundane territory—a married couple’s secrets—but puts that idea in a forbidding setting: a claustrophobic train running through desolately beautiful landscapes.

Married Americans Roy (Woody Harrelson) and Jessie (Emily Mortimer) are coming off a humanitarian effort in China, and before heading home they’re taking the Trans-Siberian train from Beijing to Moscow, a more than 4,800 mile journey. On board, amateur photographer Jessie snaps candid shots of children, babushkas and other people who flow from China to Russia and back. She’s reserved and somewhat standoffish, while Roy is a folksy populist, not letting his ignorance of Russian get in the way of having a wholesome good time.

En route, Roy and Jessie are joined in their berth by the Spaniard Carlos (Eduardo Noriega) and American Abby (Kate Mara), a young, free-spirited couple. Jessie accidentally catches them making out one evening, and her eyes betray a pang of jealousy; she and Roy are having a few difficulties, including him wanting a baby and she not being so sure.

Anderson, though, never spells out that issue; he merely lets it hover in the air around his characters and almost start to choke them in the train’s confined quarters, where intimacy can go from tender to tense in an instant. At any moment somebody can wander into the berth, knock on the restroom’s door or pass by in the narrow hallway. Everything about riding the train is in the face, which makes keeping secrets a poker match of human behavior.

And Anderson cannily lets every character keep their hand close to the vest. Jessie has a bit of a rambunctious past, which she shares with Abby piecemeal. Jessie is merely curious why this young American woman has been on the road so much, especially with this handsome Spaniard, who appears a little shifty. Both Abby and Jessie, in fact, seem to know something that they’re reluctant to divulge, and as the train’s journey progresses and Roy and Jessie become separated, you begin to wonder what Carlos and Abby are up to—and wonder if it might have something to do with the Russian detective (Ben Kingsley) who opens the movie investigating a drug killing. Transsiberian becomes a more conventional thriller as it chugs toward its end, but it doesn’t completely derail the savvy setup that got it there.