Ghost Train is a chilling supernatural horror set on an abandoned transit line where time, memory, and death ride side by side. Directed with claustrophobic precision and dreamlike dread, the film tells the story of a grieving woman who boards a late-night train and finds herself trapped on a journey that doesn’t follow tracks — but regrets.
The story begins in a fog-drenched Eastern European city. Mara, a quiet archivist mourning the death of her younger sister, takes the last metro of the night — an old, seldom-used line that her sister once claimed “leads to where forgotten people go.” Falling asleep between stations, Mara awakens to find the train empty. The lights flicker. The windows show no city, no tunnels — only darkness moving like water.
She isn’t alone.
In the dim compartments, other passengers sit in silence. Some stare blankly, others weep softly, a few whisper to themselves in languages she doesn’t recognize. There is no conductor. No signal. The train seems endless, and every attempt to get off brings her back to the same carriage. Only one thing is certain: the longer she stays, the more of her past she forgets.
As Mara explores the ghostly train, each carriage reveals a different part of her memory — childhood fragments, old traumas, lost people. A car full of mirrors reflects not her face but her failures. Another is filled with items from her sister’s funeral, but all slightly wrong. The walls breathe. The announcements whisper her name.
She begins to understand that this is no ordinary haunting — the train is a liminal space, a spiritual limbo that traps people burdened by guilt and loss. Her fellow passengers aren’t strangers, either — some are figments of her past, and some, perhaps, are already dead.
The train feeds on unresolved grief. The longer Mara remains aboard, the more she forgets who she was, why she came, and what she still needs to do. But clues left behind by her sister — messages scrawled into condensation, recordings on broken phones — guide her toward one final carriage: the "Last Stop."
This final stretch is terrifying and surreal, where the physical world unravels and she must confront the truth behind her sister’s death — a truth she buried so deep it distorted her reality. Only by facing it head-on can she break free of the endless ride.
Visually, Ghost Train is a work of haunted beauty. The lighting is sickly green and rust-red, reminiscent of sodium vapor lights in forgotten tunnels. The sound design hums with industrial dread — scraping wheels, distant sobs, and station announcements in distorted tones. The claustrophobic setting enhances the emotional tension — nowhere to run, only forward or back, deeper into the self.
Thematically, the film echoes Silent Hill, The Others, and Train to Busan, but it remains emotionally intimate. It’s about grief as a trap, about the way loss loops back on itself if unprocessed. The ghost train is not merely haunted — it’s made of haunting.
The pacing is slow and immersive. Some viewers may find it more psychological than scary, but that’s part of its strength. The fear is cumulative — not from sudden jumps, but from the realization that Mara may be the one keeping herself aboard.
The ending is both tragic and freeing. She does escape — but not without cost. One memory must be surrendered to buy her freedom. When she wakes up on a bench near a disused rail yard, dawn breaking, she no longer remembers her sister’s face — only the love that once filled the empty seat beside her.
Ghost Train lingers in the mind like a recurring dream — or a nightmare that almost made sense.
