Yeon Sang-ho’s (King Of Pigs) first live-action film puts zombies at 300mph…
Known for animated works such as The King Of Pigs and The Fake, Yeon Sang-ho’s first live-action film has been a runaway success both at home at the Korean box office – where it beat several records, including that previously held by The Admiral: Roaring Currents for first-day admissions – and throughout Asia.
The film takes a parallel track to Yeon’s previous animated film Seoul Station (now being cunningly marketed as a prequel), imagining if a high-speed KTX train had managed to leave that zombie-infested station. Gong Yoo (Silenced, The Suspect) takes the lead as errant father Seok-Woo, so wrapped up in his work as a fund manager that he leaves the caregiving to his mother and doesn’t even notice what he’s previously bought his daughter Soo-An (Kim Su-an, Memories of the Sword, Hide and Seek). Now en route to take her to her mother for a birthday present, Seok-Woo quickly finds that this is no normal commute after an infected woman boards the train just before it leaves.
On board the fellow passengers must pull together if they want to survive, from tough guy Sang-Hwa (Ma Dong-seok, Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time, The Royal Tailor) and his pregnant wife Seong-gyeong (Jung Yu-Mi, Our Sunhi, Tough As Iron), to baseball team champ Young-Gook (Choi Woo-shik, In The Room, Secretly, Greatly) and his girlfriend Jin-Hee (Ahn So-Hee, former member of k-pop group Wonder Girls and star of Korean TV drama series Entourage).
Once the film gets going, Yeon Sang-ho takes the basic idea and sets it at full speed, avoiding filling the pandemic-driven plot with too many detracting elements, unlike Kim Sung-soo’s The Flu. He presents the now-familiar zombie genre with real visual creative flair, perhaps confirming his background in animation, with enough ideas of his own to give the film an edge. He often uses the full frame, allowing the audience to immerse in the upcoming danger just out of focus. He plays with the limited vision of the zombies in darkness as the train travels through tunnels.
These are definitely zombies of the raging, fast-running variety as seen in Danny Boyle’s (albeit ‘not zombies’) 28 Days Later and Zack Snyder’s soulless remake of Dawn Of The Dead. The sight of hordes of zombies, so ferociously pursuing their prey that they slam into each other with the force to send several into the air, only usurped by hundreds creating a snaking, human chain as they desperately grab onto a train as it pulls away, while others clamber over them, all reminiscent of World War Z.
Like the best zombie films, Train To Busan follows the master Romero by presenting a social commentary. There are more than a few echoes of Snowpiercer as the survivors begin to divide into different strata to survive, largely led by businessman Yong-Suk (Kim Eui-Sung, Hill of Freedom, The Priests). So blindly concerned by his own well being, he’ll happily endanger anyone who gets in his way, he exemplifies just the sort of animal Seok-Woo risks becoming.
Throughout the cast is solid, with Yeon realising great performances from his actors as they (sometimes literally) throw themselves into their roles. Special mention should go to young Kim Su-an, who really is outstanding as Seok-Woo’s daughter Soo-an, avoiding the often precocious and overly ‘lovable’ child acting for something far more believable.
Perhaps the one thing that lets the film down is that for Yeon’s live-action debut the characterisations are rather broad and overly familiar and two-dimensional, from sporting heroes to pensioners. They lack the depth or commentary than Yeon has applied in his previous efforts, including his other zombie flick Seoul Station. Despite the subject matter, its also not as dark in tone, even allowing itself a mawkish moment out of tone with his previous work (though not with Asian cinema). It hints at possible concessions that Yeon had to make with producers in order to get his chance at a live-action film and ensuing budgets.
But this doesn’t derail from what Yeon has created here, a truly crowd-pleasing piece of entertainment that has finally put the zombie genre in the spotlight in Korea. After the acclaim and following his previous films that have provided him with modest (at best) box office, it seems Train To Busan has finally put him on the fast track success. With another live-action film in the works, if Yeon can combine the depth of his pervious films with genres audiences want to see, we could see something really special. Get on board and enjoy the ride!
Train to Busan will be released in UK cinemas from 28th October by StudioCanal.
Bonus track: watch out for an unexpected use of the famous Hawaiian song “Aloha ʻOe”, written by the last reigning monarch of Hawai’i, Liliʻuokalani.