My friend Bill and I don’t always agree on movies, but I do respect his opinion, and when he sent me an e-mail raving about “Transsiberian,” a movie I might otherwise have waited to watch on DVD, I decided I go see it in the theater.
“Transsiberian” has a nifty premise: A couple, Roy (Woody Harrelson) and Jesse (Emily Mortimer,) decide to take the Transsiberian Express from Beijing to Moscow. They end up bunking with a younger couple, Carlos and Abby, who are friendly and charming, but also vaguely suspicious. One day Roy misses the train after disembarking to look at some steam engines, and Jesse gets off at the next stop to wait for him to catch up. Carlos and Abby decide to keep her company, and Carlos convinces Jesse to take a bus out to the countryside and hike through the snow to look at a beautiful but isolated old Russian church. Thus far there’s been little in the way of action, but from the opening scenes a disquieting sense of dread has been building, and you know that spending a day alone with Carlos is probably a very bad idea, and not just because the sexual tension between him and Jesse is palpable and Carlos is always pulling little stunts, like asking Jesse if he can use her shower because the one in his hotel room is broken. Yeah, right.
Anyway (SPOILER ALERT! DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT), the church is quite lovely and also very cold and, what do you know, one thing leads to another and soon Jesse decides that the only way to ward off the aggressive and amorous Carlos is by smashing him over the head with a piece of wood until he collapses in the snow and dies. Then she travels back to her hotel and meets the missing Roy, who introduces her to their new bunkmate, a Russian police inspector played by Ben Kingsley, who adds another ethnicity to his vast repertoire with a fine performance here. At the prospect of bunking with a police inspector, Jesse becomes slightly unhinged.
“Transsiberian” is almost Hitchcockian in the way the suspense and tension steadily mount throughout the film, before spilling into violence and some fairly unbelievable action sequences toward the end. Because you’re so caught up in the story, you don’t realize just how unbelievable these action sequences are until after the film is over. I, for one, (SPOILER ALERT! MORE SECRETS REVEALED!) had a hard time believing that a naive American couple could escape from hardened Russian criminals by running barefoot through the snow and stealing a train, but maybe that’s just me. The film also preys upon whatever xenophobic sensibilities you may have by making Russia look like the coldest, most forbidding and least friendly place on earth. All of the actors are good, but special mentions go to Emily Mortimer, who creates a complex, sympathetic and frustrating character.
“Transsiberian” is always engrossing, but I wasn’t sure the parts added up into a coherent whole. Yet it’s still a pretty thrilling little film, and I like what director Brad Anderson is trying to do. He started off making unconventional romantic comedies that I didn’t particularly care for (“Next Stop, Wonderland,” “Happy Accidents”) and then veered off into darker territory. First he directed “Session 9,” a creepy supernatural thriller set in an abandoned insane asylum in Massachusetts, and “The Machinist,” a low-key psychological thriller most notable for the lead performance by Christian Bale (“The Dark Knight”) who lost more than 60 pounds to play the lead character, a man so plagued by insomnia that he can barely function. “Session 9” didn’t quite work for me, but “The Machinist” was very effective, and “Transsiberian” packs even more of a wallop. Jesse and Roy always seem like real people, who just happened to find themselves in a world of trouble. In the past few years, Anderson has quietly become an accomplished director of independent horror films and thrillers set in the here and now.
Scary movies for Halloween
Just for fun, I thought I'd list some favorite scary movies in honor of Halloween. Feel free to send me yours to
sfoss@dailygazette.net, or post comments below. Here they are, in no particular order:
1. “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” Very few movies scare me. This one did. In fact, it scared the bejesus out of me. I didn’t see the remake, but the original is an unremitting, grisly little horror film that could give even the most hardened viewer nightmares.
2. “The Wicker Man.” Perhaps one of the more perverse horror films. A police detective investigating the mysterious death of a girl stumbles across a pagan community. They seem harmless enough ... but are they?
3. I saw “The Exorcist” and “The Shining” in high school, as part of a double-bill organized by my boyfriend at the time, who seemed to delight in the fact that half of our friends were so terrified they kept covering their eyes. Later, we watched “The Silence of the Lambs.” That film was scary, too, and I can only hope that a new generation of high schoolers finds these movies just as terrifying as we did.
4. “Dawn of the Dead.” And I mean the original, the low-budget 1978 film starring a bunch of no-name actors. My dad and I watched it one weekend when my mom and my sisters were out of town. “It’s a social satire,” he explained. “There’s a lot of social commentary in it.” Well, that’s true. But there’s also a lot of gore, violence and ripping apart of flesh. Have I mentioned that I love zombie movies? This might be the best.
5. “Carnival of Souls.” I can’t resist putting this weird little cult film from 1962 on the list. A woman goes for a car ride with her friends, and is the only survivor when the car plunges into the river. She then takes a job as a church organist, but is haunted by a ghostly face.
6. “Dead Alive.” Before Peter Jackson became famous for directing “The Lord of the Rings,” he made a bunch of splatter-horror comedies in his native New Zealand. In this one, a Sumatran rat monkey at the zoo bites a young man’s elderly mother and turns her into a zombie. Can the young man stop his mother? Or will the whole village by transformed into zombies?
7. “Psycho.” Duh.
8: “Freaks.” A trapeze artist marries one of the little people in her circus troupe, Hans, and plans to steal his inheritance. When Hans’ friends in the circus find out about this, they plot revenge.
9. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that some of the most creative horror films are currently being made in Asia. “Cure,” from 1997, is actually more of a detective story, but with supernatural elements that gradually creep the viewer out. “Audition,” from 2000, contains one scene of violence so horrifying and bizarre that I actually got up and left the room for a few minutes. It’s the only time I’ve ever reacted that way to a film, which tells you something.
10. “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.” This bleak, disturbing film follows an emotionless serial killer around for a few days. The film, which is shot in a minimalist style that makes it all the more terrifying, is loosely based on the story of Henry Lee Lucas, a real serial killer who is believed to have committed hundreds of murders.
