IT IS MORE than retro-movie love to say that Transsiberian is the kind of movie they don't make anymore. On one level, it's a real triumph of art direction. Brad Anderson's film is a convincing fake of Siberia's ice and birches, filmed in Lithuania and Spanish film studios. The extras have the right faces; they look like they've been through several decades' worth of bad winters and the losing end of a cold war. The visually abrasive henna on a furious conductor's hair makes her look like Rosa Klebb's daughter. Transsiberian is more convincing and ambitious, even, than director Anderson's use of Barcelona to mimic L.A. in his last film, The Machinist.

The first five minutes take place in a grimy Russian port, which I assume must be Vladivostok. Ben Kingsley, in a fur hat and collar, looking mightily like a vulture, is exploring a murder on a shipboard. He examines a frozen corpse with a knife jutting out of its neck, executed in midmeal while seated in front of a half-eaten plate of food.

Cut to Beijing, where an American couple from Iowa is returning from a church mission. Roy (Woody Harrelson) is a hardware-store owner with a burbling interest in trains—he has a model train set in his basement. He and his wife, Jessie (Emily Mortimer), are about to take the weeklong Beijing-to-Moscow journey.

Anderson foreshadows the troubles of the "wild, wild East" Roy and Jessie will be traveling through. In the restaurant car, they hear a story of what the Russian police did to a man they mistakenly arrested. It has a keen, grisly Roald Dahl–style punch line. When the vodka starts flowing, we see the steel in Jessie. She refuses all alcohol. And it's not the refusal of a woman who has settled religious objections to drinking.

In the night, Roy and Jessie are joined in their double room by two new travelers. The too-friendly Spaniard Carlos (Eduardo Noriega) flashes his wide smile and his tattooed fingers as he talks. His younger, more wary girlfriend, Abby (Kate Mara), has supposedly been teaching English in Japan for a couple of years. Carlos is doing some apparently harmless smuggling, taking mass-produced Russian dolls to Amsterdam. He and Jessie lock eyes from the beginning. The interest deepens when Roy gets left behind while exploring the train yard in Irkutsk. ("She's still a bit ... restless," Roy confides in Carlos, right before the Iowan vanishes from the film for a few reels.) The three others deboard and wait for Roy to catch up on the next train. Since Jessie is a photographer, she goes alone with Carlos to a ruined church deep in the woods.

Later, as the train trip resumes, Roy is joined by his new pal, a Russian narcotics officer, Grinko. To watch Ben Kingsley mutter, "In Russia, we have a proverb ..." is pretty much watching what Kingsley was born to do, and to see one reason the movies were invented. This successor to Akim Tamiroff is Roy's tutor about post-communist Russia: "Once we lived in the dark. Now we die in the light."

But Harrelson brings his own double edge to the film, and we feel we might be seeing the killer inside him. Iowa is Iowa, but the kind of innocence that would lead a man to say, "Hey there, little fella!" to a snarling Chinese police dog has got to be too good to be true. "In Russia, we have an expression. With lies you can go far in the world, but you cannot go back."

As the train heads deeper into danger, Anderson serves this slice of cake with a side dish of chewy meditation about levels of trust in a marriage. Mortimer, who has never had more to work with, handles the role of lady with a past with tenderness and believability. Anderson's small-camera intimacy amplifies the slow nerve twist of her temptation. When Jessie gives Carlos a very come-hither goodbye at a bar, the grit in her performance shows us how real Jessie's longing for stability is.

A serious-looking ordeal scene in an abandoned military base is perhaps too modern for the older audience—it shows the teeth of Saw. Transsiberian has been described as "Hitchcockian," but Anderson deserves credit for more than just re-creating old shocks. There are influences, certainly, such as the marital disquiet in the 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much and situations that echo from earlier Hitchcock: Blackmail and The Lady Vanishes.

At the press screening, someone goofed with the projection masking, and for the first five minutes the English subtitles were accidentally cropped off. Even though the dialogue was in Russian, I didn't miss any information worth missing. That's how keen Anderson is in his visual storytelling.

Careful symbolism makes every scene more tangy. As in many Hitchcock films, Transsiberian has a thriller story going on apace, with the dialogue advancing the plot. But there's a deeper tale of conflict and loss going on under the surface. Jessie, beginning to long for children, is shown nesting matryoshka (mother) dolls by Carlos and told of their significance as a symbol of life's continuation.

Naturally, these dolls are a deadly MacGuffin. Snapshots and a billboard image of a lakeside cottage come back, half-glanced by the heroine, haunting her as the idea of settlement and peace, away from the dangers of one very perilous train trip.

TRANSSIBERIAN  (R; 111 min.), directed by Brad Anderson, written by Anderson and Will Conroy, photographed by Xavi Giménez and starring Ben Kingsley, Emily Mortimer and Woody Harrelson, opens Aug. 15 at selected theaters.

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