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Cast & Credits

Roy: Woody Harrelson
Grinko: Ben Kingsley
Jesse: Emily Mortimer
Abby: Kate Mara
Carlos: Eduardo Noriega

First Look International presents a film written and directed by Brad Anderson.
Running time: 111 minutes.

“Emily Mortimer delivers a freight train of a performance in Transsiberian.”

Brad Anderson is back with yet another claustrophobic suspense-thriller that isn’t far off track from his Machinist murkiness. A lot of people have been comparing this film to the likes of Hitchcock’s suspense-thrillers, and rightfully so. Here’s a movie with everything Hitchcock’s movies would offer: the same mood, the same deep and well-versed characters, the same dark humour and the very same creepy and suffocating sense of claustrophobia.

Roy (Woody Harrelson) and Jesse (Emily Mortimer) play a newly married couple, returning home from Beijing where they were helping children as part of a church project. Before flying back to the US, they decide to take a short detour and travel from Beijing to Moscow on the Transsiberian Express.
On board, Jesse has her first encounters with the loneliness and the disconnect that the train freights. Most people on the train are foreigners, and the staff aren’t exactly kind and caring. And since Woody is a good sport and can even start a conversation with a brick, Jesse finds herself left alone on this trip. She isn’t the kind of person who would just start a conversation with someone. She’s the kind who waits to see something that interests her. She needs a foundation for building her trust.

Enter Abby (Kate Mara) and Carlos (Eduardo Noriega), an interesting couple who happen to share the same coach as Roy and Jesse. This is when the revelations begin. We find out that Jesse had a past. She’s had her share of addictions and now she’s narrowed them all down to just smoking cigarettes. Abby ran away from home a long time ago and has been travelling a lot, working in the places where she stops, while Carlos is a charming man, a full decade older than her and there’s something about him that just isn’t right.

Jesse then notices that Carlos has been eyeing her. This makes her uncomfortable. But there’s another side of her, the side of her that she has pushed deep within, the side that urges for his attention.

The next morning, the train makes a long stop and Jesse finds herself taking a walk with Abby, talking about her life and marriage. Roy, a hardcore train enthusiast finds himself checking out some of the nearby parked steam engines. When Abby spots a group of suspicious looking men nearby, she boards the train with Jesse. A few minutes later, the train starts moving and it takes Jesse a while to realize that Roy isn’t on the train. The train staff explain to her that the only thing that she can do is get off at the next station and wait for her husband to take the next train and meet her there, which was only likely to happen the next morning.

Carlos and Abby decide to get off at this station and give Jesse some company. They then take up rooms in a nearby hotel. Taking this as an opportunity, Carlos decides to get comfortable with Jesse, now clearly showing his intentions to her. The situation gets worse when Carlos takes her on a supposed photo-trip but ends up cornering her in an abandoned church. Jesse manages to overpower him and her struggle ends quite morbidly.

Jesse quickly returns to the hotel to find that Roy has now reached and he’s made friends along the way with Grinko (Ben Kingsley), a compromised Russian narcotics detective.
The tension begins to escalate as Jesse later discovers that Carlos and Abby are drug smugglers and that he had actually slipped some of the drugs into her bags. From this point on, the movie takes a complete turn for the darker side and the spaces that we had made glad assumptions about just a few minutes ago in the film, become darker and creepier. A sense of no escape or return, begins brimming up and writer / director Brad Anderson, being the expert that he is in this genre, makes full use of all the tricks in his bag.

This film offers a good chance to see some splendid acting from all the lead characters and chug some serious pop corn while you’re at the edge of your seat.