Train to Busan (2016)
Directed by Yeon Sang-ho
When a zombie virus pushes Korea into a state of emergency, those trapped on an express train to Busan must fight for their own survival.
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15 films that influenced Train to Busan
What critics say influenced Train to Busan
MONTREAL — In what will undoubtedly be called “Snowpiercer”-with-zombies in countless reviews (well, including this one), director Sang-ho Yeon’s “Train To Busan,” making its North American premiere at Fantasia Film Festival, has a hook that sells the sizzle in a few short words: On a train hurtling across South Korea, passengers must fight to survive against horde of zombies.
As an allegory of class rebellion and moral polarization, it proves just as biting as Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi dystopia “Snowpiercer,” while delivering even more unpretentious fun.
Equal parts “Snowpiercer” and “World War Z,” the film introduces itself as the rare pastiche with enough personality to feel like something new.
(If you’re looking for that, there’s always Snowpiercer.)
The bullet train environment is the major selling point for Train to Busan, and like Snowpiercer, the film wrings out much of its momentum from a sense of visual progression.
There are echoes of Snowpiercer in the film’s depiction of societal collapse.
But writer-director Yeon Sang-ho, making his live-action debut after a number of animated features (“The King of Pigs,” “The Fake”), has seen the same films and TV shows you’ve seen — “28 Days Later,” “World War Z,” “The Walking Dead” — and he’s out to do something different with the genre.
In many ways, it’s what “ World War Z ” should have been—a nightmarish vision of the end of the world, and a provocation to ask ourselves what it is that really makes us human in the first place.
Equal parts “Snowpiercer” and “World War Z,” the film introduces itself as the rare pastiche with enough personality to feel like something new.
The movie that “World War Z” should have been, “Train to Busan” has everything.
That’s a saving grace, especially as the zombies start swarming en masse and dominate the frame a la World War Z.
Train to Busan does a hypnotic job with its zombie effects, which owe a debt to the floodlike spilling-over aesthetic of World War Z.
Starting with George A. Romero, the filmmaker who invented the flesh-eating monster genre with 1968’s “Night of the Living Dead,” zombie movies often double as social allegories for the era in which they are made.
Owing a lot to “Night of the Living Dead” and “28 Days Later,” Yeon Sang-ho’s horror thriller is a masterful zombie film that succeeds in injecting pure terror in to the sprinting zombie once again.
Indeed, as all the best monster movies and undead efforts such as Frankenstein and Night of the Living Dead have previously emphasised, pondering the concept of culpability is as compelling as charting causality, consequences, and the usual narrative mechanics.
Almost 60 years since George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead made its bow, and some seven seasons deep into The Walking Dead, one would imagine that the zombie apocalypse sub-genre is surely running out of fresh brains.
Sure, the movie borrows from tons of other films, notably Snowpiercer , made by another South Korean director, and there's even a nasty Karl Hardman-type businessman character (whose extreme selfishness leads to the deaths of others), borrowed from the original Night of the Living Dead .
But the vibe here, executed with technical polish but with more lo-fi intimacy than the likes of World War Z, is actually closer to classic zombie fare, especially OG classics like George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978).
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The zombie/train combo has actually been done before, notably in 1972’s Horror Express, but Train To Busan is considerably more propulsive and less narratively cluttered.
It doesn't take a hardcore horror fan to know what's coming next, though such fans will have seen it before, notably in the 1972 Peter Cushing-Christopher Lee film Horror Express.
But whether it’s alleged prototype “Let Sleeping Corpses Lie” rip-off “A Monstrous Corpse” or the more recent “Zombie School” (2014), they’ve all been slapdash and unoriginal.
Pay attention for this new, wildly entertaining B-movie is the most nuanced monster movie since Bong Joon-ho’s The Host (2006).
A flattened deer, mowed down in a quarantine zone in Seoul where some kind of chemical spill has occurred (echoes of Bong Joon-ho’s 2007 enviro-horror film, “The Host”), springs back to life.
But the key to the fun is that Yeon eschews lookie-loo gore for thrilling set pieces: his fleet, imaginative action scenes recall Brad Bird’s crisp transition to real people in peril when he made his “Mission Impossible” movie.
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It’s a bit like The Taking of Pelham One Two Three with added cannibalism on this journey from Seoul to Busan.
Fund manager Seok-woo (Gong Yoo, A Man and a Woman) and his young daughter Su-an (Kim Su-ran, Memories of the Sword) rank among those fighting for their lives, and trying to work through their family issues in the process.