Much as Far Eastern horror has proved to be a treasure trove of eviscerating scripts for Hollywood to pillage and rehash, the fall of the Iron Curtain has opened up a cheap new playground of backdrops steeped in menace, being culturally close enough to the West to make for an easy bridge to cross for the imagination, but on the other side of which lurks a Transylvanian-inflected parallel universe stuck in some vague past, with limitless dark forests teeming with gangsters, prostitutes, satanists, perverts and psychopaths. Deliverance-land, then, but with added strange languages and murky history. It helps that you can always throw in a few shots of opaquely expressionless toothless babushkas and nicotine-steeped cackling peasants, because that adds local flavour and we've all seen them on our weekends in Prague or Tallinn. Hence Outpost, Severance and Hostel, to name a few, and now Transsiberian, in which Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer are American Christian Aid workers returning from China via Siberia by train, for a bit of adventure to add to their bland lives. Then a couple with an obvious hidden agenda moves on them and danger looms.
On the plus side, it slots in some arresting shots in the interludes, and the set-up, for all its stereotypes, is actually quite adroitly handled and holds off drawing blood for an admirable while. A shame then, that when it does play its hand, it utterly falls apart in both pacing and credibility and becomes an altogether more natural medium for Ben Kingsley to take over with his latest gimlet-eyed hard bastard, this time a Russian police investigator. Blah.
5/10
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