Seok-woo (Gong Yoo) is a cynical, workaholic fund manager and divorced father in Seoul who, suddenly racked with guilt, agrees to take his lonely young daughter Su-an (Kim Su-an) to Busan by train for her birthday to visit her mother. Among the other passengers are working-class, expectant couple Sang-hwa (Ma Dong-seok) and Seong-kyeong (Jung Yu-mi), flirtatious young baseballer Yong-guk (Parasite co-star Choi Woo-shik) and his cheerleader crush Jin-hee (Sohee), arrogant express company COO Yon-suk (Kim Eui-sung), two elderly sisters (Yee Soo-jung and Park Myung-sin) and a homeless PTSD sufferer (Choi Gwi-hwa). Everything's going smoothly, until a sickly young woman runs unnoticed onto the train and becomes a zombie. Now, the train becomes beset with a zombie pandemic - just like all of South Korea, it turns out.
Train to Busan has been touted as Snowpiercer meets World War Z, and while I can understand those comparisons narratively, overall it is superior to both those films (particularly the latter) and beholden to neither. Director Yeon Sang-ho and writer Park Joo-suk take the zombie film and the train setting and marry them for a result which, while it didn't scare me, proves thoroughly effective, claustrophobic, exciting and even layered. Even when the action is raging (and it is very gruesome) Yeon and Park manage to tell a human story commenting on class division and conflicts (trains have separate classes, after all), pollution, globalisation and most of all, family. These elements are also perfectly well-performed, with all the cast giving suitably natural turns.
Yeon also makes brilliant use of the visual design. The train sets are instantly convincing because they're so familiar (despite it being a foreign country) and the zombie make-up effects are no-holds-barred. Throw some blisteringly efficient editing and a pounding score in, and the result would've made George A. Romero proud. For pure undead thrills and an increasingly cerebral and emotional story, Train to Busan easily reaches its destination.
No comments:
Post a Comment