Boris Volodarsky turns a real luxury train into a four-agency spy war in The Train

Boris Volodarsky spent one career inside Soviet intelligence and a second one taking it apart, from a captaincy in Spetsnaz GRU to a shelf of books on how Moscow tracks and kills its defectors. His first feature as writer and director, The Train, drags that expertise onto a moving set, a farewell voyage of a historic luxury express where every passenger is carrying a second face.

The film unfolds almost entirely aboard the Majestic Imperator Train de Luxe, a real Austrian heritage train that Volodarsky uses as both location and plot engine. Its owner, Leo Goldberg, throws a glamorous onboard show and a private auction as the carriages roll from Vienna toward Prague by way of Budapest, offering the Majestic to the highest bidder. The sale is the cover story. The train’s sealed compartments, limited exits and near-total anonymity are the real draw, and not for collectors.

What Goldberg has built, in the film’s telling, is a near-perfect intelligence platform. A Russian operative travels under deep cover. MI6 agents pose as a honeymooning couple. A team of Chinese operatives quietly wires the cars for surveillance. A former special forces officer boards with his young daughter and no obvious allegiance. The champagne and the string quartet stay on; underneath them, a small and fully contained war begins.

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Madalina Bellariu Ion and Dennis Dewall lead the ensemble as Natalie Krug and Major Alex Stirling, with Dewall also producing. The supporting cast runs to Anouk Auer, Alan Burgon, Paul Lockhart, Louise Marie Prack, Leonie Bielesz and Polina Kuleshova, among others, under the Austrian outfit Westside Studios. The single confined location, a train that will not stop to let anyone off, does the structural work a chamber thriller needs: it manufactures motive while cancelling escape.

Volodarsky’s own record is the film’s most unusual selling point. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society with a doctorate from the London School of Economics, he wrote The KGB’s Poison Factory: From Lenin to Litvinenko and Stalin’s Agent, and served as chief consultant on the BBC Panorama investigation into the Litvinenko poisoning. A director who has spent decades reconstructing real assassinations and defections is now staging invented ones, which sets a high bar for the procedural credibility the finished film has to clear.

That bar is where the doubts sit. The Train arrives with almost no festival footprint, an ensemble largely unknown outside German-speaking territories, and a premise, four rival services boarding the same carriage on the same night, that asks for a healthy suspension of disbelief before the first stop. Whether Volodarsky’s expertise becomes tension on screen, or merely accurate tradecraft that never quite turns into cinema, is unproven. The picture also carries no confirmed distribution beyond a short list of markets, which caps how far its pitch can travel for now.

The Majestic Imperator gives the production a texture it could not have faked on a soundstage: gilded Habsburg-era carriages, marquetry, brass and velvet, shot on the rails rather than rebuilt. The film leaned into that provenance, opening with a world premiere in Berlin before Austrian screenings staged on and around the train in Vienna and Linz.

None of that guarantees the covert war holds together once the novelty of the setting wears off, and a first-time fiction director working with a modest cast and a single set has little margin for a slack middle act. But the concept is clean, the location is genuinely rare, and the man behind the camera knows the difference between how spies are written and how they actually work.

The Train opened in Austria and Germany on September 10, 2026, with CineStar handling the exclusive German theatrical release, and reaches United Kingdom cinemas on September 17. No United States theatrical release has been confirmed at the time of writing.

Tags: action, Thriller, Anouk Auer, Boris Volodarsky, Dennis Dewall, Mădălina Bellariu Ion

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