Train To Busan

Zombies are the Swiss Army knife of horror cinema: they can be, and have been, dropped into almost any scenario you could think of. The shuffling, personality-free masses are a great blank slate on which to project whatever allegory you want. So it is no surprise to see that Korean director Yeon Sang-Ho’s new thriller, Train To Busan, sees the hordes of the undead placed aboard a speeding commuter train during a zombie outbreak in contemporary South Korea.

This film went down well at its Cannes 2016 Midnight Movie screening, and its easy to see why. Instead of just lazily putting a bunch of shuffling creatures onto a train and letting the blood fly, Yeon Sang-Ho has put some thought into how to use the train’s tight confines - and the fact that it is a high speed moving object stuck on one track - to create tension. These zombies also run, for one thing, which drastically reduces the time the largely hapless and mismatched group of commuters have to react. So beyond cramming into the tiny toilet cubicles to avoid the sniffing zombies and struggling to find ways to block the hordes off from carriages when none of the doors lock, the passengers also have to exploit the train’s interior in more imaginative ways, including crawling in the luggage racks to avoid particularly dangerous carriages.

As befits a film set on a rapid commuter train, the pace rarely lets up. But despite there being plenty of action (including some CGI-assisted ‘horde’ sequences that recall the more effective moments from World War Z, which also showcased running zombies), the film also works in some pertinent social commentary, as certain first class carriages dominated by the wealthy one per cent start to cut themselves off from the rest of the train so as to refuse admittance to those they fear are infected.

The central relationship between the main characters - divorced, work-addicted fund manager Seok-woo (Yoo Gong)- and his cute, deadpanning daughter could have felt tacked on, but packs quite a lot of emotional heft. The film walks back and forth over the line between black comedy (many of the laughs are delivered by co-star Ma Dong-seok, who plays the laconic but surprisingly badass zombie-basher Sang Hwa) and high-wire terror, but it plays both very effectively. Get aboard this “Snowpiercer with zombies” express special as soon as possible.