We’ve read enough mysteries and seen enough thrillers to know by now that, in fiction, by and large, nothing good ever happens on a train. Corpses appear; ladies vanish. Don’t get us started on Snowpiercer.
True to form, misery and dread seem to be the traveling companions for Laura (Seidi Haarla), a rudderless Finnish exchange student voyaging solo on a locomotive from Moscow to Murmansk, in Compartment No. 6. It was supposed to be a romantic sojourn, with her archaeologically informed partner Irina (Dinara Drukarova), to study the ancient Kanozero Petroglyphs, of which Laura holds only a nominal interest.
But Irina had to stay in Moscow to work, and Laura is forced to share her compartment with Lyokha (Yuri Borisov), a boorish Russian miner given to drunken ramblings and who, within moments of their first conversation, sexually assaults her. Welcome to Mother Russia.
Life constricts aboard the unfriendly confines of this charmless, multiday trek from one chilly depot to another. Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen, in his sophomore feature, presents a snowblind Russian travelogue of the sort not featured on tourism pamphlets, even before the country became a nation non grata to the West. We feel the claustrophobia as Kuosmanen’s camera eschews exteriors and wide shots, immersing us in a world reduced to narrow corridors and cramped sleeping quarters. Forced to commune with a rotten roommate, it’s enough to drive anybody, well … off the rails.
Or, perhaps, it might just force a kind of togetherness, because what’s the other option? Like two people marooned on a proverbial island in a droll New Yorker cartoon, Laura and Lyokha become acquaintances out of sheer proximity and boredom. Lyokha, it turns out, can be playful, even genuinely funny, when not hammered, and it’s not long until these aimless drifters enjoy that most universal of fraternal intimacies—sharing a cigarette.
They disembark together at overnight stops, sharing car rides (“I have connections,” he offers, when he shows up at the depot in an obviously hot-wired sedan) and even lodging on terra firma, albeit in different beds. When a Finnish tourist arrives on board late in the journey, harboring an acoustic guitar and the soul of a poet, Lyokha dutifully plays the part of jealous boyfriend, sullen and bitter.
Compartment No. 6 shared the Grand Prix Award at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, and was Finland’s Academy Award selection for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2022 Oscars. Though it ultimately wasn’t nominated, it was a smart consensus choice, a layered movie for grown-ups about a tender transcultural friendship in which barriers are broken and masks removed.
The sun seldom shines in Compartment No. 6, but for Laura, the experience is akin to an awakening, a revelation that she’s been living as an imposter in a world of (relatively) high society. In the opening scene, intellectually outmatched, she struggles to keep up with Irina and her circle of sophisticated friends. She’s more impressed, she reveals to Lyokha, by the wallpaper on the apartment, and its high ceilings. It’s no coincidence that in the opening scene, she’s introduced in Irina’s bathroom —- separate from the group even when together.
And when discussing her “desire” to see the petroglyphs, she parrots a platitude about understanding the past to appreciate the present that she gleaned at the party. These primitive rock drawings aren’t her passion; they’re an illusion of a purpose from a person playing the role of curious globetrotter. Laura is clearly out of her element, but that’s partly because her element has yet to be discovered.
The film could have benefited from a judicious trim to its third act, set largely in Murmansk, and having lost the momentum, literal and metaphoric, of its train setting. It’s one of the ironies of cinema that sometimes a movie feels freer when it boxes itself in than when it opens itself up. When nowhere feels like home, even a spartan bunkbed on a rickety locomotive can serve as a space for reflection and growth — while rescuing the train from its long history of cinematic misdeeds.
COMPARTMENT No. 6. Director: Juho Kuosmanen; Cast: Seidi Haarla, Yuri Borisov, Dinara Drukarova, Julia Aug; Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics; Rated R; opens Friday at Living Room Theaters at FAU, the Classic Gateway Theater in Fort Lauderdale, and the Tower Theater in Miami