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Another year, another horde of zombie films. So far in 2016 we’ve seen Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, The Girl with All The Gifts, Zoombies and Dead 7. Not to mention the ubiquitous The Walking Dead that returns to our television screens with its seventh season this month. Have we had our fill of trailing intestines, half-eaten bodies and rotten flesh? Train to Busan answers no. And I whole-heartedly agree.
The premise is simple; a divorced father and his daughter decide to take the train from Seoul to Busan for an obligatory visit to his ex-wife. Unbeknownst to those onboard, an infected young girl has stowed away on the train. Within minutes, she has bitten several passengers and the disease has spread rapidly. Half an hour into the film, the entire train is populated by the rabid undead. Chaos ensues.
The characters are familiar archetypes from zombie thrillers, but with some unusual traits thrown into the mix. The father of the young girl, Seok Woo (Yoo Gong) cares deeply for the safety of his daughter and for himself and will do anything to keep the infection at bay, even if that means leaving behind elderly passengers and slamming a carriage door shut on a pregnant woman. His callousness is akin to the villainous characters we are familiar with in The Walking Dead or in earlier zombie flicks like Night of the Living Dead. Placing this personality in a leadership role is an interesting inversion and certainly contributes to the audience’s engagement.
Without giving too much away, the zombies that feature in Train to Busan are partly typical of the genre and partly unconventional. For one, they are fast. From the moment that a person is bitten, the transition takes only seconds and the animated corpse is hell-bent on ravaging anyone in it sight. The best scenes in the film are the ones in which the camera speed slows down and masses of zombies move through the train, ripping at throats and gorging at eyes. It’s bloody fantastic and exactly what you want from a zombie film. The only aberration to the virus here is that the zombies cannot smell and their vision is relatively poor. It is only in bright sunlight that they can distinguish a human form and position themselves for attack – a species flaw that is used to the survivors’ advantage, of course.
Train to Busan features some unforgettable action sequences, from a string of zombies hanging onto the back of a train to one survivor, Saany Hwa (Dong-seok Ma) punching zombies with his bare fists as he makes his way through each carriage. The score is effective whilst never distracting from the drama on screen and the claustrophobic setting perfectly evokes that feeling of inevitable doom and stifling unease.
The only criticism I can make is the contrived dialogue that takes place between father and daughter in the brief moments of reprieve between each zombie attack. However, it’s something that is easily forgotten once the action revs up again. Train to Busan verifies the enduring appeal of the zombie in cinema and will undoubtedly sit comfortably among other modern classics like 28 Days Later (2002) and Land of The Dead (2005).
