A young woman is found strangled on a train. Shortly thereafter a number of her fellow travellers get murdered too. It looks as though someone somewhere is most anxious to eliminate all potential witnesses...
"Compartiment tueurs" is a tense, suspenseful thriller with memorable characters and a remarkably twisted intrigue. The movie also includes clever observations, such as the fact that it is easy to determine the sex of a stranger who stumbles over some of your possessions in the dark. The one who apologizes is female, the one who curses is male...
The viewer is drawn into an increasingly frantic police investigation trying to make sense of fistfuls of data, clues and red herrings. Along the way, the viewer meets with a wide variety of people - eccentric, naive, romantic, over-conventional, opinionated, sex-obsessed or sensible. Some of the stories being told are heart-wrenching, such as the tale of the well-preserved widow (a fine performance by Simone Signoret, by the way) who has fallen under the spell of a much younger lover. Even if this story were being told outside of a thriller context, it would still breathe a tragic sadness.
I liked "Compartiment" a great deal and so I recommend it to you. Still, near the end there is a villainous character who collapses like a broken chair and tells the police everything they want to know. If the character had kept his mouth shut, as any normal criminal would, the police would have found it hellishly difficult to solve the remaining questions. And as a result the denouement would have looked far, far different.
"Compartiment tueurs" is a tense, suspenseful thriller with memorable characters and a remarkably twisted intrigue. The movie also includes clever observations, such as the fact that it is easy to determine the sex of a stranger who stumbles over some of your possessions in the dark. The one who apologizes is female, the one who curses is male...
The viewer is drawn into an increasingly frantic police investigation trying to make sense of fistfuls of data, clues and red herrings. Along the way, the viewer meets with a wide variety of people - eccentric, naive, romantic, over-conventional, opinionated, sex-obsessed or sensible. Some of the stories being told are heart-wrenching, such as the tale of the well-preserved widow (a fine performance by Simone Signoret, by the way) who has fallen under the spell of a much younger lover. Even if this story were being told outside of a thriller context, it would still breathe a tragic sadness.
I liked "Compartiment" a great deal and so I recommend it to you. Still, near the end there is a villainous character who collapses like a broken chair and tells the police everything they want to know. If the character had kept his mouth shut, as any normal criminal would, the police would have found it hellishly difficult to solve the remaining questions. And as a result the denouement would have looked far, far different.