Night Train

Ella Stimson

• Last Updated: November 16. 2009 6:53PM UAE / November 16. 2009 2:53PM GMT

Director: Brian King Starring: Danny Glover, Leelee Sobieski, Steve Zahn


One night shortly before Christmas, an overnight train makes an early stop. A new passenger, clutching a mysterious box, emerges from the forest. Shortly after boarding, he dies in front of his fellow passengers Chloe (Leelee Sobieski), a highly strung medical student, and Peter (Steve Zahn), a failing salesman, and the veteran conductor Miles (Danny Glover). Miles starts to report the death, but then Peter looks inside the box and their fate is sealed. The unseen contents apparently promise riches and the three find themselves bound together by their obsession with the box, willing to go to great lengths to keep it for themselves. What is really inside – it casts the same glow on the face as the briefcase in Pulp Fiction did – is never really revealed, nor is the origin of the box. But what does emerge is that there are many others who are prepared to kill to keep it, and that the box itself might be more dangerous than any of them. “It kills you,” one of the pursuers warns, “in the worst way: from the inside.” Anyone who looks at its contents will be dead by sunrise, they say. Beneath the supernatural elements, Night Train is a straightforward parable about greed. It presents an intriguing premise and makes good use of its setting, but despite an increasingly bizarre plot it never really sparks in to life.