TRAIN TO BUSAN
Going loco
released OUT NOW! 15 | 118 minutes | also VOd
Director sang-ho Yeon Cast Yoo Gong, soo-an Kim, dong-seok Ma
Sang-ho Yeon’s Korean horror does for zombie movies what Gareth Evans’s The Raid did for martial arts flicks, blending intensity, imagination and WTF-ery to rocket the genre to unexpected places.
An outbreak of fleshchompers has reduced Seoul to chaos, and a bullet train speeds towards the titular city in hope of delivering its passengers to survival. But a strange little girl clambers aboard just as it pulls off, and the carriages soon fill up with ravenous hordes – just as the blurred landscapes outside the bloody windows are also clogged with gnashing fiends.
Blending claustrophobic suspense with frenzied setpieces and vitriolic class satire (this would make an inspired double-bill with Joo-ho Bong’s Snowpiercer), Train To Busan puts the loco in locomotive. Yeon should also be congratulated for punctuating the crazed action with character beats, though the bonding between a workobsessed dad (Yoo Gong) and his young daughter (Soo-an Kim) overdoes the schmaltz.
Not that you’ll be complaining: the last 15 minutes is so large-scale bonkers it’s like Yeon is making a live-action cartoon – not surprising, perhaps, given his background is in anime. Jamie Graham