Dir: Jerzy Kawalerowicz Writers: Jerzy Lutowski, Jerzy Kawalerowicz | Cast: Lucyna Winnicka, Leon Niemczyk, Teresa Szmigielówna, Zbigniew Cybulski | 99′ | Thriller | Poland
Stylish and endlessly compelling, Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Night Train (1959) is an accomplished psychological thriller set aboard an overnight train carrying a disparate group of passengers from Warsaw to the Baltic coast.
A key work of the Polish School, which flourished briefly during the 1950s, this seductive noir-inflected whodunnit was written and directed by the renowned Jerzy Kawalerowicz.
It features a subtle, charismatic performance from Leon Niemczyk as Jerzy, a suave traveller in dark sunglasses and slicked-back hair bound for Gdańsk. Having lost his ticket, he offers to pay for a double sleeper cabin for his exclusive use, only to discover that his berth is already occupied by the enigmatic Marta (Lucyna Winnicka), who refuses to leave. Forced to share the compartment, their guarded behaviour immediately sets the tone for this sinister and unsettling journey into the night.
During a brief stop, Jerzy steps onto the platform to buy cigarettes and is pursued by a mysterious woman, while Marta encounters her possessive former lover, Staszek (Zbigniew Cybulski). It soon emerges that a murderer is at large and may even be aboard the train. Suspicion quickly falls on the inscrutable Jerzy.
With remarkable narrative economy, Kawalerowicz sustains the tension throughout, exploiting the claustrophobic confines of the train while revealing as little as possible about his beautiful, emotionally guarded protagonists. The audience is left to do much of the detective work, encouraged to suspect Jerzy while the film quietly adheres to the maxim, “Speech is silver, but silence is golden.” Marta, meanwhile, is clearly under immense emotional strain because of Staszek’s unwelcome presence.
Yet despite Jerzy’s understated allure, there is little romantic chemistry between the pair. They remain strangers both to their fellow passengers and to one another, united only by their shared status as outsiders in a world eager to judge and condemn without evidence.
Night train journeys evoke the exhilaration of the unknown: the excitement of travel, the possibility of danger, and the allure of mysterious strangers. Night Train revels in all these elements, with Andrzej Trzaskowski’s smouldering jazz score (reminiscent of his work on Innocent Sorcerers) deepening the film’s atmosphere of unease. A triumph of cinematic restraint, Night Train recalls Hitchcock’s North by Northwest in its undercurrents of paranoia and mistaken suspicion.
Beyond its noir pleasures, the film also functions as a subtle metaphor for xenophobia and a society distrustful of anything unfamiliar—a Poland struggling to emerge from the suffocating grip of Communist orthodoxy and Socialist Realism.
ON AT THE BFI LONDON 7th July with introduction by Kazuo Ishiguro in a season dedicated to his train film favourites