Train to Busan – Busanhaeng (2016)

Directed by: Sang-ho Yeon | 118 minutes | action, drama, horror, thriller | Actors: Yoo Gong, Soo-an Kim, Yu-mi Jung, Dong-seok Ma, Woo-sik Choi, Sohee, Eui-sung Kim, Gwi-hwa Choi, Terri Doty, Jang Hyuk-Jin, Seok-yong Jeong, Chang-hwan Kim, Myung-sin Park, Eun-kyung Shim, Soo-jung Ye

In the opening scene of South Korean ‘Train to Busan’, a pig farmer arrives at a quarantine blockade on his way home. There’s something about a leak in the biotech district. After his car has been sprayed clean, the man is allowed to drive on. Shortly afterwards, fiddling with his phone, he runs over a young deer. It results in a bloodbath. The animal cannot possibly still be alive, the farmer assumes. He decides to drive on. Still, when the car is out of sight, the deer, jerking and jerking, stands up and stumbles away. All the color is gone from his eyes.

The film’s sequel focuses on a young businessman and his daughter. He is a busy man who has little time for his daughter due to his work. She longs for the days when her parents were still together. A time before her father was possessed by the big money. She prefers to spend her upcoming birthday with her mother. But he lives completely on the other side of the country, in Busan. When the birthday present he bought for her does not go down well, the man gives in. They will take the train to Busan together.

Unsuspectingly, they start their journey early in the morning. The fact that the world around them seems to be on fire is largely ignored by them. His mind is still on his work, she dreams of a happy family reunion. When they have made it to their train, that wish comes a lot closer. Until, just before the doors close, a mortally wounded woman rushes in. When the woman attacks some unsuspecting train passengers, the same happens to the injured as the deer from the opening scene. They fall, creak to their feet and, with a blank look in their eyes, the remaining fellow travelers begin to attack. The train to Busan is slowly being taken over by purebred zombies.

With that, ‘Train to Busan’ enters the realm of the zombie film. A genre in which the origin or fate of the zombies is secondary to social criticism. In fact, it doesn’t matter where the zombies come from or what danger they pose to society. Somehow, these kinds of movies aren’t about characters and how they try to escape their undead assailants. Characters represent a greater thing. They are almost entirely in service of the theme. George Romero’s primal films, for example, deal largely with the depravity of the consumer society.

The characters and zombies in ‘Train to Busan’ are also thematic pawns. Here the criticism is directed at greedy fund managers, who can no longer see their fellows because of their blinders of money. The main character is one of them. As the wave of zombies draws ever closer to him and his daughter’s compartment, his work still takes precedence over his environment. It is unimportant that there are countless people who need his help. He prefers to leave them to their fate. In situations like this, you just have to take care of yourself, he tells his daughter.

It is a selfishness that comes from fear. Only when he learns to help his fellow man does he show himself to be a courageous person. And can he win the respect of his daughter. The travelers who remain in their train compartment die, the passengers who leave their supposedly safe places for the unknown continue to live a more dignified life. As long as they do it together.

That is, in these individualized times, no superfluous message. A message that, however, is very much on top in ‘Train to Busan’. Now the zombie film itself is of course a little nuanced genre, so that is not insurmountable. More disturbing is that the film faithfully follows the conventions of the genre. The delineation of the train compartments makes characters smart, but also somewhat easily isolated. All the characters live up to the genre clichés, from the pregnant woman to the smug director who becomes a traitor. The zombies behave as we are used to from them. Everyone gets the chance to play the hero, which cannot prevent a few good guys from being bitten by the zombies (the transformation into zombie is also very fast, but a bit slower with the more important characters). And so on.

Also with regard to the visual language ‘Train to Busan’ is not very original. But the effective tension arc makes it all extremely effective. The alternation between rest and action is in balance. Because the train is constantly in motion, the characters also get more dynamics. By clever use of mobile phones, those characters get more and more pieces of the puzzle. Gradually, they become masters of the situation, overcome their fear and actually grow. It’s not all that complicated, but because of the many moments of tension, the involvement is high enough to take that simple character growth for granted. ‘Train to Busan’ is ultimately a skilfully produced film that adds little content to the genre.