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, the English Channel. It takes a judicious while to introduce Scott's ambiguous fellow travellers, yet even when the pace accelerates, Nooshin holds on to a strain of logic that doesn't often survive at this level of filmmaking. If you've wondered what goes on inside a driver's cab, or glimpsed something indecipherable through a rain-spattered carriage window, it should just work.

• This article was amended on Friday 18 October 2013. The original star rating (three stars) was mistakenly downgraded to two when uploaded to the website. This has been corrected.