Roy and Jessie have been in China, doing good works at the expense of their marriage. How to recapture the magic, now that it's time to go home? Roy thinks a final big exotic adventure will do it: Instead of flying home, they'll take the legendary Transsiberian Express.

Counseling would have been so much easier.

What Roy (Woody Harrelson) and Jessie (Emily Mortimer) don't know is that the train's glory days are a thing of the Soviet past. The sleeping compartments provide all the comforts of a sardine can, the staff is surly, and the passengers unsavory at best. Up-tight teetotaler Jessie is weirded out. Roy, the cockeyed optimist, gets into the spirit(s).

At least there's one other English-speaking couple aboard: Carlos (Eduardo Noriega) and Abby (Kate Mara), entrepreneurs who travel perpetually, buying and selling handicrafts such as those lovable little Russian matryoshka dolls that fit inside each other.

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'Transsiberian'

3 stars = Good
Ratings explained

• Starring: Woody Harrelson, Emily Mortimer, Ben Kingsley.
• Rating: R for violence, including torture, and language.
• Web site: firstlookstudios.com

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The foursome bonds, for want of any other bondable human options.

The stops along the way are few and far between. At one of them, gung-ho Roy gets separated from the others, and the train leaves without him. Jessie is distraught. She gets off at the next station, to wait for Roy -- who'll surely be arriving on the following day's train. Abby and Carlos helpfully wait with her.

Or maybe not so helpfully.

A Russian undercover agent named Grinko (Ben Kingsley) likewise wants to be helpful. But to whom? Grinko seems more interested in Carlos -- and in Carlos' matryoshka dolls.

Writer-director Brad Anderson provides his Hitchcockian thriller with an increasingly startling plot that is nothing if not unpredictable. The story's final descent into savagery pushes the limits of credulity, but Mortimer and Harrelson are committed to their odd characterizations that drive it.

All the while, Xavier Gimenez's moody cinematography takes full ominous advantage of the snowy, desolate landscapes.

See this one, and you'll never complain about Amtrak again.

Opens at the Manor.