106 min | R | January 26, 2022 | Sony Pictures Classics
A Finnish woman boards a train across the Russian Arctic to see ancient rock carvings. Her assigned bunkmate is a drunk Russian miner who insults her within minutes. The journey is the destination, and the carvings turn out to be the least interesting thing she finds.
Laura is a young Finnish woman riding the train from Moscow to Murmansk to see the ancient petroglyphs at the edge of the Arctic. She boards expecting solitude and gets Lyokha, a drunk Russian miner who shares her cramped sleeping compartment and immediately insults her. Juho Kuosmanen sets the whole film inside this forced proximity and the frozen landscape sliding past the window. The petroglyphs are the excuse. The real subject is what happens when two people who would never choose each other are locked in the same small box for days.
Seidi Haarla plays Laura with a guardedness that thaws by degrees. She watches Lyokha with disgust and then curiosity and then something she does not have a name for. Yura Borisov plays Lyokha as a man who covers loneliness with crudeness and then drops the act when no one is looking. The shift in his face when he stops performing is the engine of the film. Their scenes work because neither actor reaches for sentiment. They earn the connection through small gestures and long silences in a rocking train car.
Kuosmanen wrote the script with Andris Feldmanis and Livia Ulman from Rosa Liksom’s novel. He shoots the film handheld on grainy stock that makes the late-nineties setting feel lived-in rather than nostalgic. The camera stays close to faces in the compartment and lets the train’s motion supply the rhythm. There is almost no score. Kuosmanen trusts the rattle of the rails and the hum of conversation to carry the emotion, and the absence of music makes the rare moments of warmth hit harder.
This is a road movie that goes nowhere it expects and arrives exactly where it should. Laura sets out to see something carved in stone and finds the more durable thing is the brief human contact she did not want. Kuosmanen refuses the easy romance the premise dangles and builds something stranger and truer in its place. The film understands that the people who change us are rarely the ones we go looking for.