TRAIN TO BUSAN (2016) FILM REVIEW

****

15, 118 Mins

Terribly timely pandemic viewing.

‘A Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula’ (2020) was in cinemas shortly before lockdown and just last week arrived on home viewing services. It’s a mixed bag of a movie with some blood-splashing zombie action, but too many storyline diversions for its own good.

But its relevance to 2020 couldn’t be more timely as in this movie the world or more specifically South Korea is recovering from the after-effects of a pandemic. Whereas in real-world the Covid-19 death toll crossed 1 million, the virus in ‘Peninsula’ and its predecessor ‘Train to Busan’ (2016) turns people into zombies who feast on flesh.

With ‘Peninsula’ available to rent now, I thought what better time to revisit ‘Train to Busan’ which played in the Midnight Screenings section of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival and became the first Korean film of that year to break the audience record of over 10 million cinema-goers.

The set-up of ‘Train to Busan’ is a lot like any other disaster movie. A group of hapless civilians are trapped in an enclosed location while a mega catastrophe affects the outside. In this case, it’s a viral epidemic caused by a leak in a biotech plant.

Boarding the titular train from Seoul to Busan is Fund Manager Seok-Woo (Gong Yoo) who is trying to reconnect with his estranged young daughter Su-an (Kim Su-an) and is taking her to her mother in Busan. There’s a working-class man on the train (Ma Dong-seok) and his pregnant wife (Jung Yu-mi). Alongside them is a snivelling COO (Kim Eui-sung), a high-school basketball team, two elderly sisters and a homeless guy.

As with all disaster movies, you’ll find yourself unconsciously dividing the characters into ranks as to who dies or gets bitten first. The horrible COO surely has to die as he’s a wrong un’ and movies tend to hate rich people. Meanwhile the pregnant woman is definitely a potential victim as cinema seems to love torturing pretty, screaming girls.

What’s refreshing is that none of the characters you expect end up biting the bullet. The COO continues to be as insufferable as you can possibly get throughout the vast majority of the nearly 2 hour runtime. The pregnant woman also doesn’t get a silent childbirth scene unlike poor Emily Blunt in ‘A Quiet Place’ (2018).

The zombie effects are really quite remarkable especially considering this movie was only made for $8.5 million. My favourite example of undead animatronics in the film comes in the opening shot where a road-killed Deer morphes back to life with red eyes and mutilated limbs. I was reminded here of that truly repulsive scene in ‘The Evil Dead’ (1981) where the dead zombies decompose.

Later on, there’s a wonderfully physical and bloody fight scene within the train carriage. The train is heading to the South Korean city of Busan which is the only place in the country to fend off the growing epidemic - a kind of quarantine zone. In this sequence, the working-class man gets to flex his bulging biceps and fisticuff the zombies with his bare hands.

As all hell rages loose outdoors, ‘Train to Busan’ makes time for some cute kiddie sentimentality about fathers and daughters and all their estrangements. It’s very common for these kinds of movies to include a subplot involving a bad dad and a cute kid trying to break even amidst an impossibly horrific crisis. ‘War of the Worlds’ (2005) did this with Tom Cruise trying to be a good daddy to Dakota Fanning while Martians in tripods took over the Earth.

The scenes between Seok-Woo and Su-an in this movie are what gives ‘Train to Busan’ its beating emotional heart. I was moved to tears, for example, during the former’s sacrifice to protect his little girl. And Kim Su-an who plays Su-an is a child actor to rival Brooklyn Prince in ‘The Florida Project’ (2017) and Dai Bradley in ‘Kes’ (1969).

Although released in 2016, ‘Train to Busan’ couldn’t feel more chillingly contemporary than it does in the Covid era. Perhaps we should be looking at the band of survivors in this movie to see how we can best cope with this pandemic. 

Whether you want to read the film as a parable about pandemics or simply a rollicking, shoot em’ up zombie flick, ‘Train to Busan’ delivers on both counts.

‘Train to Busan’ is available to rent now.