To quote the film, "It's better not to know. Better still to forget. Best of all to be abandoned." Oh, the irony.

A ghost story with all the technical refinements of a Hollywood horror film, but horrifyingly bad dialogue after the first quarter of the film, and you feel like you're being preached to from the start.

It's as if the writers' cumulative character dialogue can be summed up by bad cop TV and a Jerry Springer show. Fitting, maybe, for a film like The Hitcher, not a Russia-set horror film. The result is that a potentially great setting and some potentially great gore scenes go to waste and become just silly, not scary or meaningful.