Brian King

(In French, On Cable TV, August 2022) There’s a difference between stylized and stylish—the first being an intention, the second being a compliment. Low-budget filmmaking often relies on stylization: in order to present something on-screen without breaking the budget, filmmakers often resort to functional CGI, visual shortcuts and even screenplay tricks. At times, Night Train relies far too heavily on those stylized elements, not quite making it to the “stylish” honorific. Much of the story is set on a train speeding through an endless winter forest landscape—cold and snowy on the outside, warm and cozy on the inside. Wait, did I say cozy? Well, as cozy as can be a near-empty passenger wagon with a dead body inside and three other people looking at each other suspiciously. What could have been a closed-room murder mystery, however, turns out to be something far wilder. Writer-director Brian King has something less realistic yet far more frustrating in mind, as a magical box comes to take a dominant place during the rest of the film. While the action stays on the train and clearly relies on cut-rate CGI for its exterior scenes, the film’s few characters mean that King can get a few name actors: In-between Steve Zahn, Danny Glover and Leelee Sobieski, the film does have a well-known cast for 2009. (As showbusiness goes, all three have experienced a significant career decline since then, with Sobieski even retiring from acting to focus on family and visual art.)  Night Train does try to do much with its small cast and mysterious supernatural forces. Some of it even works—seeing the attractive Sobieski gradually go from frumpy tuque-wearing bespectacled nerd to devil-crazed femme fatale is one of the film’s highlights. But in the end, as the gratuitously downbeat ending is nailed into place, there’s a feeling that the film fails to justify its existence, and that the corners cut in order to make the story fit into the budget aren’t in the service of something particularly worthwhile. The story definitely has lulls stretched to feature-film length, and an additional character may have enlivened a few things. I’m not happy about the use of a mystery-box plot device (especially given the undefinable nature of its mysterious content) but it’s certainly not the worst problem I have with the result. To be fair, the film does have enough going for it to make it a marginal pick—Sobieski is striking, Glover brings his usual calm intensity to the proceedings, and the supernatural plot device makes the film more than yet another monster film. The stylization attempt is interesting—but I don’t think that Night Train is successful enough to qualify as stylish rather than contrived.