The 90-second trailer for Transsiberian, writer-director Brad Anderson’s Hitchcockian thriller releasing July 18 from First Look, conjures up memories of just how effective Session 9 and The Machinist were as unremittingly stark, anxiety-provoking mood pieces.

The movie stars Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer as an American couple who decide to take the long way home from their recent sojourn in Asia, boarding the legendary express train from Beijing to Moscow. On their way, they meet another couple (Eduardo Noriega and Kate Mara), with whom they quickly form a bond as fellow travelers away from home. When Harrelson accidentally gets separated from Mortimer at a stopover, she begins to realize that their new friends aren’t exactly who or what they seem to be; more danger surfaces when a deceitful Russian detective (Ben Kingsley) arrives, asking questions about a heroin smuggling scheme.

The exoticness of the setting — its snowy landscapes and grim sense of containment — is a big part of what helps sell Transsiberian, certainly, but Anderson (who’s been busy between full-length features with work on HBO’s The Wire and Sounds Like, an entry in the Masters of Horror anthology series) is an ace with tone, and even if the last five seconds of the trailer seems to tip its hand a bit, this looks like to be a solid genre base knock.