Nothing turns me off more than when zombie films gradually derail from character development and fall into the trap of gorefests and amusement killing just for the sake of it. Train to Busan, however, restores my faith in the sub-genre as director Yeon Sang-ho does not treat his characters as mere cannon fodder. Each character arc is well-contemplated, the established relationships may not be equally potent with each other, but for a film to wrestle with so many of them while successfully maintaining the edge-of-the-seat tension, the result is quite brilliant.
We can see positive character growth in the main protagonist, Seok-wu (Gong Yoo), a divorced, workaholic fund manager/”corporate bloodsucker” who consistently neglects his daughter Su-an (Kim Su-an). We get to know that he’s not exactly father-of-the-year material, he buys his kid a Nintendo Wii for her birthday oblivious to the fact that he already gave one to her earlier the same year. He reprimands her daughter’s misplaced kindness during the zombie invasion, “In times like this, you have to think for yourself first.” Few scenes later, the girl says to him, “You only think about yourself. That’s why mommy left.” Boy, he just got “re-educated” This kid is going to be her dad’s moral compass throughout their eventful ride to Busan.
Busan also includes a group of archetypal commuters to make this horrendous experience relatable to a wider audience: a pregnant woman (Jung Yu-mi) who’s heavily relying on her brawny husband (Ma Dong-Seok), a pair of elderly sisters (Ye Soo-jung and Park Myung-sin), a pair of high-school sweethearts (Choi Woo-sik and Ahn So-hee) and a stern-looking businessman (Kim Eui-sung). The last person to hop in, however, is a girl with a strange bite on her thigh. We know where this heads now but the train crew seems to be more alarmed at the presence of a homeless man (Choi Gwi-hwa) hiding inside the washroom. Alas, once the infected girl rips the throat of her first victim and the zombies start to chomp and multiply (Hold the door! Hold the door! Hodor!!!), the film starts to categorize its characters: the selfless and the self-serving. These zombies may be the film’s antagonist but there is a much more unsettling beast at the face of damnation: society quickly adepts to a new set of morals. Earning his spot as one of the most hated cowards in history, Eui-Sung’s businessman character is the epitome of greed in this film. As he literally flings his fellow survivors to the undead for the sake of self-preservation, the point is clearly made that this is a dog-eat-dog world, whether it is the apocalypse or not.
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Whereas its obvious competitor World War Z shows a city-wide scale of apocalypse, Busan proves that confining it to a smaller scale is not a hindrance to deliver well-choreographed and jolt-inducing action sequences. Needless to say, my favorite part of this film is when the three male characters start to navigate their way through the carriages, each station proving to be more difficult than the last one. It certainly helps to know that these morphine-driven, break-dancing zombies have a flaw to them: they can only see or hear but they can’t smell… and they’re also not taught how to open doors. Once those rules are established, director Sang-Ho levels the playing field by turning tunnel drives into game cheats, washrooms into sanctuaries and luggage compartments into unlikely safe passages. (On a side-note, you will also find yourself mourning more for the current state of our railroad services. Words like ‘vestibule’ are mentioned in the film and I have to google it after. Upon seeing the image, oh… we don’t have them here, that’s why.)
Train to Busan may not reinvent the zombie sub-genre per se but director Yeon Sang-Ho has a clever use of technique for this film to work both as a grisly form of entertainment and as a potent social allegory as well. For that, he solidifies his spot as a go-to-director when it comes to zombie films. The buzz for this film is totally worth it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyWuHv2-Abk
