Night Train to Lisbon

Night Train to Lisbon follows Raimund Gregorius, a Swiss classical languages teacher whose orderly, solitary life in Bern is upended by a chance encounter with a Portuguese woman. After he keeps her from jumping off a bridge, she disappears, leaving behind a coat and a book by Amadeu de Prado, a Portuguese doctor and poet who opposed the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar. Moved by the writing, Gregorius abandons his teaching post and takes a night train to Lisbon to learn who the author was and what his life contained.

The film adapts Pascal Mercier's novel of the same name. Bille August directed it, the ninth of the fifteen features he has made, arriving between Marie Krøyer and The Chinese Widow, from a screenplay by Greg Latter and Ulrich Herrmann. Jeremy Irons plays Gregorius, with Mélanie Laurent, Jack Huston, Martina Gedeck, Tom Courtenay and August Diehl in supporting roles. It was a co-production of Germany, Portugal and Switzerland, made for about 8 million dollars.

On IMDb the film holds 6.8 out of 10 from over twenty thousand votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.5 from several hundred; a smaller critics' sample averages 5 out of 10, below both audience figures. The gap suggests viewers responded more warmly to the story of a man overturning his life than reviewers did.