Kazuo Ishiguro’s top ten train films

I’ve always loved train movies. It seems I’m not alone. Since I began preparing this season, fiercely advocated suggestions kept pouring in, often from total strangers. Curiously, ‘train movie’ isn’t an acknowledged genre like, say, the western or the musical. No director, actor, period or country is associated with it. And as this selection shows, the films themselves cross naturally with a wide range of other genres: thriller, whodunnit, romantic comedy, dystopian sci-fi, prison breakout. But we all recognise and love the tropes and atmosphere created by the jolting wheels, the steam, the narrow corridors, the compartments concealing mini-dramas, the confrontations in the restaurant cars. 

To be clear: a ‘train movie’ isn’t one with just a memorable train sequence in the middle, still less one that happens to have ‘train’ or ‘express’ in its title. Unrequited love stories set on railway platforms aren’t train movies; neither are those in which protagonists fight on train roofs or dangle precariously off the side. What follows are real train movies. Some famous, others unjustly obscure. Each one wonderful.

Director: Josef von Sternberg

“It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily,” Marlene Dietrich tells a naive Englishman aboard an express crossing a China teetering on revolution and civil war. In this, the mother of all train movies, even the star power of Dietrich and Anna May Wong at their peak is almost upstaged by von Sternberg’s stunning chiaroscuro images.

Director: Walter Forde

German star Conrad Veidt and ace Austrian cameraman Günther Krampf bring a near-expressionist Weimar sensibility to this riveting British thriller, set aboard a train filled with enjoyably stiff-upper-lipped stereotypes. Deplorably neglected today, this deserves to be remembered both as a classic and as a strangely serendipitous blending of two normally opposed cinematic styles.

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

On a train crossing Europe on the brink of the Second World War, Iris takes tea with the friendly English governess she met in her compartment. Minutes later, the governess has vanished and none of the train’s eccentric gallery of passengers will admit to having ever seen her. Propelled by a superb Launder and Gilliat script, Hitchcock’s finest British film is, by turns, hilarious, thrilling, romantic and scary.

Director: Jerzy Kawalerowicz

This New Wave-ish Polish gem was internationally lauded on release, but is now largely forgotten. Suspicion spreads  among the passengers of an overnight train to a seaside resort with the rumour that a murderer on the run is somewhere on board. Kawalerowicz compellingly captures the forced intimacies and claustrophobia on the train until the thrilling final act bursts onto a wider canvas with an unforgettable sequence that probes the atavistic depths of human crowd behaviour.

Director: Sidney Lumet

You may know the ‘solution’ to this famous Agatha Christie mystery, but Lumet’s virtuoso filmmaking will quickly pull you under its macabre yet cosy spell. Albert Finney’s mesmerising Poirot dominates at the centre of an ensemble of legendary stars, each of whom makes a memorable contribution. It’s one of the few Christie adaptations prepared to accommodate the darkness often lurking in her vision.

Director: Andrei Konchalovsky

Two convicts break out of a hellish prison to find themselves trapped on a speeding train they can’t control. Is this Jon Voight’s finest moment? (He and Rebecca De Mornay both received Oscar nominations.) On the surface very American, this superb edge-of-the-seat existentialist parable was directed by Russian Konchalovsky and based on an unproduced Akira Kurosawa screenplay.

Directors: Ermanno Olmi, Abbas Kiarostami and Ken Loach

Three Palme d’Or winners share the directing credit, but I’ve yet to find anyone who has seen this film. (Aside from the stranger in the Japanese restaurant who alerted me to its existence – my thanks to him.) This triptych film moves through a single pool of passengers on a crowded European train; among them an ageing professor, some boisterous Glasgow Rangers fans and a refugee family. If the three directors’ styles mix too unevenly to make this a lost classic, Tickets is nevertheless extraordinarily fascinating. And Kiarostami’s episode is a particular revelation.

Director: Brad Anderson

Starting like a well-made ‘strangers on a train’ thriller, this soon takes a Dostoevskian turn as Jessie (Emily Mortimer in a formidable central performance) is pushed to confront ever darker realms of her own nature. It may put you off talking to people on trains, but TransSiberian evokes powerfully the euphoria, chaos and horrors of Russia’s post-Soviet ‘mafias’ period. And Ben Kingsley’s narcotics officer is easily as scary as his East End gangster in Sexy Beast.

Director: Bong Joon Ho

The Korean maestro moved effortlessly into the English language with this celebrated slice of post-apocalyptic lunatic mayhem. A man-made ice age has killed off all life on Earth, bar a remnant of humans surviving inside a sealed train that endlessly circles the globe. The ordinary folk occupy the rear carriages in terrible conditions; the privileged and powerful in more luxurious ones towards the front. Rebellion looms. Tilda Swinton is magnificently hateful as a head mistress-cum-enforcer.

Director: Juho Kuosmanen

Her long-term relationship crumbling, a Finnish art student takes a train beyond the Arctic Circle to the north coast of Russia. She’s forced to share an austere compartment with a boorish young miner (Yura Borisov, as brilliant here as he was in Anora) who delights in making her feel uncomfortable. But as the landscape outside grows bleaker, these two lost souls begin tentatively to share empathy and friendship. Sublime and heart-warming, Kuosmanen’s Cannes Grand Prix winner has the gentle profundity of Chekhov’s best stories.

Station to Station: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Top Ten Train Films, featuring each of the films listed here, is at BFI Southbank from 1 to 31 July. 

Tickets for screenings in July will be on sale to BFI Patrons on 1 June, BFI Members on 2 June and to the general public on 4 June.