Compartment No. 6

Directed by Juho Kuosmanen, Compartment No. 6 follows Finnish grad student Laura (Seidi Haarla) as she meets and eventually befriends a boorish man (Yuriy Borisov’s Ljoha) during a long train ride. It’s an agreeable setup that’s employed to surprisingly underwhelming and increasingly tedious effect by Kuosmanen, as the filmmaker, armed with a script written with Andris Feldmanis and Livia Ulman, kicks Compartment No. 6 off with a head-scratchingly unpleasant opening stretch devoted to the many humiliations faced by Haarla’s sympathetic figure – with the less-than-promising atmosphere compounded by Borisov’s nails-on-a-chalkboard work as the mostly intolerable Ljoha (ie he’s just so awful). It is, as such, not surprising to discover that one’s efforts at working up a continuing, rooting interest in the bond between Haarla and Borisov’s respective characters fall hopelessly (and completely) flat, and there’s little doubt, as well, that the meandering, episodic midsection slowly-but-surely transforms Compartment No. 6 into a distressingly uninvolving and periodically interminable endeavor – which, when coupled with an anticlimactic and endless third act, cements the picture’s place as a misbegotten misfire that does, at least, boast a comparatively enthralling final few minutes.

*1/2 out of ****