It’s a familiar set-up – two strangers with nothing in common, over time, realise how similar they are. The real journey isn’t across a landscape but through their hearts and souls. And so on. But Juho Kuosmanen’s second feature manages to hit familiar beats with very different rhythms and rhymes, delivering a film that rewards and surprises. You think you’re ahead of it until you’re not.

Laura (Seidi Haarla) is a young Finnish woman travelling northward from Moscow to the Russian city of Murmansk in the Arctic Circle to see the Kanozero Petroglyphs, a collection of ancient rock carvings. To get there, it’s a 4-day journey in a small train compartment that will trundle slowly but surely through the Russian winter. Sharing the eponymous compartment with Laura is Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov), a loutish and combative Russian miner, moving for work. It is at some point in the mid-90s. Everyone has to come to terms with new ideas of “business”. Putin isn’t on the horizon yet. A brown rustic soviet infrastructure backdrops incongruously with the fashions and hairstyles. The country looks out of synch, unsure where it’s going and so do Laura and Ljoha.

Laura isn’t supposed to be on this trip alone; her lover Irina, a professor of literature, was meant to be here too. Not only is their relationship status ambiguous for us, the audience, but Laura herself is finding it hard to know whether there’s much meaning to her and Irina or whether she’s just one in a string of girlfriends. Nevertheless, Laura knows she wants Irina’s impressive and intellectual life, surrounded by important books and academic parlour games. Ingénue Laura has a youthful pretentiousness and an aimlessness that jars with Ljoha’s rough and macho energy. But, as you might expect from the set-up, over time, we find that Laura and Ljoha are both putting on affectations to hide their vulnerabilities, which will see them generate a bond that neither of them knew they needed.

With a mixture of bluntness and subtlety, two fabulous central performances, and graceful, intimate handheld camerawork, Compartment No. 6 makes what could feel like well-trodden drama territory earned and fresh. There’s no romanticised idealism like BEFORE SUNRISE, nor the melodramatic heaviness of BRIEF ENCOUNTER, but there are endless cigarettes, litres of vodka, and an unnamed yearning for human connection to warm up hardened, lonely hearts. The most surprising element is that it is not really a romance at all, but about allowing your true self to be exposed and still feel cared for and understood.

Attention to the period detail at a minute level gives its setting and these characters a completeness, a nonchalance that complements the film’s restraint and sense of distinctiveness. With its meet-cute set-up and an opposites-attract romantic dynamic, it would be easy for COMPARTMENT NO. 6 to ramp up the kitsch of such a specific period of post-soviet 90s Russia, but instead, the world feels lived in, particular and naturalistic. Juho Kuosmanen has already been linked in style to fellow Finn Kaurismäki, and this comparison has something to it, as they seem to share a sense of drollness and plainness that draws out very human stories. There is a refreshing break from cliché and nostalgia, providing charms, peculiarities, desolation and hope.