Compartment No. 6

Directed by Juho Kuosmanen

Running time: 1hr47 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Seidi Haarla and Yuriy Borisov in Compartment Number 6

With her love life in limbo and her dreams on hold, young Finnish archaeology student Laura (Seidi Haarla) sets out travelling, taking a long train journey from Moscow to Murmansk, where she plans to see some ancient, elusive petroglyphs. The trip is not one of blissful self-fulfilment and Instagram-worthy sights along the way. For starters, she has to share a cramped sleeper cabin with a stranger: weird, wired Russian lad Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov), who effectively introduces himself by aggressively trying to get in her pants. Somehow, things improve from there, but Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen’s beguiling comedy Compartment No. 6 doesn’t follow neat, expected narrative arcs. Rather like Laura’s journey, it moves in fits and starts, its two unwillingly paired characters bonding in brief, mood-driven moments of generosity or weakness, before drifting apart again as random acquaintances. 

Think Before Sunrise on a true backpacker’s budget and aesthetic, with much messier drinking, and then you’re only part of the way there: Kuosmanen’s film is a romance of sorts, but not a love story. Simple human connection is the prize here, and it is sometimes as impermanent as the view from a train window. As Ljoha, Borisov’s gangly, hyper physicality is alternately puppyish and offputting, which is key to the credibility of the strange, sweet buddy dynamic he forms with Haarla’s utterly winning heroine: we believe they wouldn’t bond under any but the most contrived circumstances, but also that a few hours in each other’s company would reveal their mutual eccentricities. 

Indeed, Compartment No. 6 is a paean to all the mini-relationships we form while travelling, with seatmates and bar patrons and helpful passers-by, very few of which turn into anything long-term, though they all mean something in the moment. Kuosmanen, who previously won the Un Certain Regard award in Cannes with his unexpectedly tender boxing biopic The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, clearly knows the oddly comforting loneliness of solo travelling, and watching it after a year in which such pleasures have largely been denied us, I fell hard for its restless, curious spirit — down to its repeated use of Desireless’ yearning ’80 banger ‘Voyage Voyage’ on the soundtrack. Accidental it may be, but the new genre of post-lockdown cinema begins here.  

COMPARTMENT NO. 6 (HYTTI NRO 6) (2021) Written by Andris Feldmanis, Juho Kuosmanen, Livia Ulman | Shot by Jani-Petteri Passi | Edited by Jussi Rautaniemi

Selected for the Competition at the 74th Cannes Film Festival