Review: 'Compartment No. 6' is a long, cold train ride through Russia, with two engaging traveling companions

Let’s tackle the big Russian elephant in the room first: I’m not sure now is the right time, what with Vladimir Putin sending the Russian army to invade a sovereign democracy, for a movie where a gruff-but-sensitive Russian laborer is one of the main protagonists.

But those are the cards dealt to us in “Compartment No. 6,” last year’s Grand Prix winner (second place) at the Cannes Film Festival, a Russo-Finnish drama about warming hearts in a cold place.

The titular compartment is shared by two passengers on a train from Moscow to the far-north city of Murmansk. Laura (Seidi Haarla) is wide-eyed student from Finland, in Russia to learn the language and curious to see Murmansk’s famous petroglyphs. Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov) is a hard-drinking Russian construction worker, headed to Murmansk because there are jobs there.

As the trip starts, Laura pines for Irina (Diner Drukarova), a Moscow intellectual with whom Laura was romantically involved — and who was supposed to accompany her on this train ride. Soon after they part, though, Laura learns a hard truth in a single phone call.

Laura and Ljoha take an immediate dislike to each other. She finds him boorish and sexist, and possibly threatening. He finds her standoffish, more interested in looking at her video camera than interacting with real people, like him.

As the train ride goes on, though, they start to see things in each other that are more appealing. That makes it sound like “Compartment No. 6” is a cut-and-dried romance, and it’s not — because Haarla and Borisov bring some complex shades to the characters, and Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen (who co-wrote the screenplay with Andrew Feldmanis, adapting a novel by Rosa Liksom) provides the room during this long train ride to let them explore those shades and take the story down tracks one doesn’t expect.

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‘Compartment No. 6’

★★★

Opens Friday, March 25, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas. Rated R for language and some sexual references. Running time: 107 minutes; in Finnish and Russian, with subtitles.