Train To Busan (2016)
Zombie movies are such a staple in horror culture that they’ve gone through more transitions than any other subgenre. They’ve been around since some of the earliest days of horror cinema, they’ve gone through booms and droughts, and they’ve been everything from edgy to comical. It’d be hard to think of an era of horror cinema that doesn’t have at least one iconic zombie movie to hold up, and as we’ll be talking about today, even entire countries’ cinematic presence can be changed thanks to one.
Train To Busan, made in 2016, follows fund manager Seok-Woo and his disillusioned daughter Soo-An. He’s spent much of his life being absent from hers, and he seems to be very focused on his work over his family. This is best shown in that his wife now lives far away in Busan, while he remains in Seoul. His daughter wants to see her mom for her birthday, and after Seok-Woo accidentally buys her a repeat gift, he decides that he should acquiesce. They board a train to Busan at Seoul Station, just as something bad seems to be going down in the city.
The train ends up with one stowaway, as a woman stumbles on board unnoticed. She seems to be suffering from some kind of wound, a wound that kills her, only to reanimate her moments later. Soon, passengers fall one by one as the virus spreads through the cars, and a group of survivors manages to hole up in one of the front cars. From this point on, Train to Busan is a thrill ride of drama, action, and social commentary.
As an American, I won’t pretend that I know the social situation over in South Korea. As such, I don’t really know that more nuanced statements being made by this movie. However, some of them seem to be broad strokes, things that are more about society as a whole. For one, the government calls the outbreaks “riots”, insists that everything is fine even as we cities burning, and urges the public to just trust them. It doesn’t take a Korean sociology degree to empathize with the statement being made there.
Another obvious point being made is one of class division. The rich passengers, especially COO Yon-Suk, treat a homeless man with disdain, and the blue collar Yoon Song-hwa with indifference. Seok-Woo often looks out only for himself, something that his daughter call out, and that Song-hwa is none too fond of either. The movie spends a lot of time showing these people whom society would keep separated that, in the end, we’re all just people trying to make it work.
There’s a really good scene where Song-hwa, who spends much of the movie calling Seok-Woo names, finally has a real conversation with him. In it, Song-hwa empathizes with Seok-Woo, saying that, while everyone may give him static over never being there for his daughter, he gets it; dads get a lot of shit for that sort of thing, but he also gets that Seok-Woo is sacrificing time with his daughter so that he can give her a good life. It’s a strong moment, one with incredible acting from Seok-Woo’s Gong Yoo and Song-hwa’s Ma Dong-seok. Dong-seok blew up after this movie, and one needn’t question why.
It’s good to see Train to Busan tackling such heavy topics, as the genre is one that has long been a vessel for such statements. Dawn of the Dead tackled consumerism, with scenes of zombie-filled shopping mall intentionally mirroring NORMAL scenes in a shopping mall. Even one of the earliest, most influential movies of the genre, Night of the Living Dead, features an African-American leading man in a role that didn’t require it, the first to do so, in fact. The zombie genre, in pitting mankind against twisted versions of themselves, becomes a fantastic vehicle for examinations of ourselves and our world.
Train to Busan also hits its writing and tension out of the park. Moments like part of the survivors ending up getting onto the train late, and thus being further back in the cars, give us excellent set-ups for awesome payoffs. The splintered group decides to fight their way through four of the cars in an attempt to save another group who are pinned in the cramped bathrooms between cars. Thus, three of the survivors, Seok-Yoo, Yoon Song-hwa, and the young baseball player Min Yong-Guk, start a rampage forwards. It’s an amazing chain of fights, as their approach changes based on the situation in each car.
With an unbelievably powerful ending that I wouldn’t DARE spoil for anyone, Train to Busan was one of a few films to make it so the cinematic world at large started taking South Korean cinema seriously. K-dramas have been beloved by a cult following for longer than that, but it’s not coincidence that this movie was the first South Korean film to break 10 million viewers worldwide, and its showing at the 20126 Cannes Film Festival paved the way for movies such as Parasite to finally get the recognition that the country’s films deserved.
On top of all of that, though, Train to Busan is an earnest, heartfelt movie, one that is a defining moment in the genre. Train stands side by side with turning points such as Dawn of the Dead, Zombieland, and 28 Days Later, all of which put a new lens on the genre, and which will be remembered as not only good zombie flicks, but as stellar movies overall.
