The story follows a young US couple returning home via transiberian rail after a missions trip to the far east. While on board they are joined by another couple, Carlos and the much younger Abbey. Gradually it becomes apparent that this couple is not all that they seem. Soon the young americans find themselves surrounded by hostile foriegn faces, separated by their own marital difficulties and the machinations of those around them.

Anderson creates a post soviet Russia full of collisions between old and new. In this Russia faces peer out everywhere, old, young, faces you would trust with your life, faces you’d be afraid to look away from, faces that see too much and faces afraid to be seen because of what’s underneath. In this Russia one gets the idea that guile and guilt do not always measure out equally precisely because, as one character so aptly puts it in his spin on post Soviet existence, “Once we were a people living in darkness, now we are a people dying in the light, you tell me which is better.” Spoken by a Russian authority figure on a moving train to a young American couple only just beginning to realize they are in an unwelcoming no mans land the words have the ring of truth no matter who Andersons good and bad guys turn out to be. It isn’t that morality has ceased to be relevant in this part of the world it’s that our young couple only sees that world and people in it through the lens of a camera or the naive wonder of a tourism interested mostly in reinforcing the romantic fantasies they already have regarding it. When reality pushes past the old world charm they are left to confront their own moral ambiguity every bit as much as any corruption native to current Russian society.

Comparisons to Hitchcock are fair here but it should be said that Anderson is dealing in a harsh visual reality that couldn’t be further removed from Hitchcocks self-aware glamour period. If anything this is anti-glamour, people and places as they really are in the service of a tightly wound moral vs. the dictates of genre or audience expectation. Forget Vertigo or Rear Window or North By Northwest. The truly remarkable, Hitchcockian, thing is the way that Anderson ratchets up suspense. There’s plenty of action in Transiberian but the intense suspense is generated by the ever tightening circle of lies and choices around the characters defining their path until it is so narrow that they have no more choices left except the facing the truth.

This is genuinely an all star cast but again it plays against type if Hitchcock is our point of reference. Woody Harrelson, Emily Mortimer, Ben Kingsley; these are actors are better known for their exquisite technique than any star power. I once spoke at length with Brad Anderson and have followed his career closely ever since. He seemed to be the sort of creative person that thrives on bringing lost characters through to the other side but who won’t do so if the only way is to cheat the audience just to make a point. No one is really expendable in Andersons fictional universe, everyone has power but put ot the wrong use that power destroys. In Andersons universe truth can set you free even if ou suffer for telling it. Left untold it carries you on a dangerous journey to the outer reaches of what people will do to remain hidden in the shadows, what they trade to get a bit of pleasure or a little money.

Hitchcock often called his movies popcorn for the masses the implication being that they were unimportant as long as they entertained. Anderson takes a polar approach mking cinematic choices seem as vital and alive as the moral ones that shape the world that we make so many movies about.