At The Movies: Compartment No. 6's humane, intimate train journey

Compartment No. 6 (M18)

107 minutes, opens July 21 at The Projector

The story: A Finnish archaeology student and a boorish Russian miner are strangers sharing compartment No. 6 on a train from Moscow to the Arctic Circle. Mutual distaste thaws over their 2,000km winter passage in this 2021 Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix winner.

Three reasons to watch this film:

Seidi Haarla plays the forlorn foreigner missing the female lover she has just left behind. Yuriy Borisov is electrifying as the vodka-swigging, sausage-scarfing, all-round ill-mannered knucklehead who asks if she is a prostitute.

What is extraordinary about them is how believably ordinary they are. Compartment No. 6 is another character piece of nuanced naturalism by Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen following his 2016 critical hit, The Happiest Day In The Life Of Olli Maki.

An adaptation of a 2011 Rosa Liksom novel shot using handheld cameras on board Russian trains, the 1990s-set travelogue fully relives the cramped corridors, the odours, the noise, the drafty chill and the tungsten lights of the Soviet rail experience. The movie is Before Sunrise (1995) for the unwashed, caging the couple in miserable intimacy.

The journey ends in something more than friendship, yet it is too chaste to be a romance. It is a connection between two solitary travellers never to meet again, one that the understated film-making turns into a bittersweet human love story.

The story: Vigilantes are gruesomely killing off the suspects of unsolved homicides. Sean Lau plays a former detective intent on stopping them, even though his legendary Inspector Jun Lee is a paranoid, delusional wreck long dismissed from the police and now a vagrant.

Three things to note about this film:

The Hong Kong crime thriller Detective Vs Sleuths is Lau's second time playing an unhinged cop for director Wai Ka Fai, after Mad Detective (2007).

No other actor is this good at being this wild-eyed, leaping into flooded canals and ranting at air. Or is Jun talking to the victims' ghosts, asking for clues to their murders? Jun communes with the dead, and Lau is at once indefatigably entertaining and poignant in the hero's psychological torment.

She and Raymond Lam play married detectives on the investigating task force. She is the cool head to Jun's chattering mind, a dependable ally when he becomes accused of planning the slayings.

Wai is the regular directing partner of fellow Hong Kong film-maker Johnnie To, whose light touch is sorely missed amid the hectic gun violence and character pile-ups.

But the metaphysical eccentricity of their hits, with titles like My Left Eye Sees Ghosts (2002) and Running On Karma (2003), is as much Wai's, and this twisty tale has personality.

Make that personalities: Jun is not the only schizophrenic character on the loose in this film.