"Last Passenger" (The Guardian 18/10/13)

Last Passenger (15) 97 mins ***

The British action movie remains a rare beast – understandably so, if you recall 1997’s Downtime, which attempted to emulate Die Hard in a tower block with an asthmatic Paul McGann. The genre may get a boost from writer-director Omid Nooshin’s enjoyably crafty, neo-Hitchcockian debut, set aboard a midnight commuter train. Dougray Scott is the medic trying to return his son to Sevenoaks when the guard disappears and the driver – whose death drive is left chillingly motiveless – speeds through Tunbridge Wells, with no terminus in sight save, perhaps, the English Channel. It takes a judicious while to introduce Scott’s ambiguous fellow travellers, yet even when the pace accelerates, Nooshin holds onto a strain of logic that doesn’t often survive at this level of filmmaking: if you’ve ever wondered what goes on inside a driver’s cab, or glimpsed something indecipherable through a rain-spattered carriage window, it should just work. 

Last Passenger opens in selected cinemas from today.