TRAIN TO BUSAN, written and directed by South Korean filmmaker Sang-ho Yeon, is an intense and exciting zombie action train thriller in the mould of a 28 DAYS LATER and SNOWPIERCER crossbreed. The film follows Seok Woo (Yoo Gong) a businessman travelling on a train with his young daughter Soo-an (Soo-an Kim) on her birthday so she can visit his estranged wife in Busan. As their journey begins, a young woman clambers onto the train gasping for air, with a deep bite wound on her leg. The woman’s eyes roll over white, veins pop out of her head and she begins to attack every passenger in sight with an insatiable appetite.

Everyone who is bitten also becomes infected, and the virus quickly spreads throughout the train until every compartment is full of either charging zombies or fleeing passengers. It is now up to Seok Woo to keep himself and his daughter alive as he begins to move through the train, in a desperate attempt to avoid the flesh eating attackers. The film moves at an electric pace, flitting between moments of thrilling action and tense anticipation. One of the most charming things about the film is that it avoids any dull exposition about the possible origin of the virus: a leak at a biotech facility is given as the briefest of explanations, and then the film hurtles straight into the action.

… highly entertaining and packed with well executed action …

On his journey through the train, Seok Woo encounters a slew of other passengers running for their lives, including a teenage baseball player and his girlfriend, two elderly sisters, a homeless man and a burly soon-to-be father and his pregnant wife. The panicked passengers dive into a furious war between themselves as they question the best means of survival. One self-important corporate businessman nominates himself as leader, and his rash and selfish actions soon descend into an almost cartoonish villainy.

Sang-ho Yeon, tackling his first ever live action film, does a skilful job of handling the action sequences which are at the core of the film’s most effective moments. However, occasionally the film dwells too much on the sentimental, at times employing an emotional swooping score and close ups of slow motion crying – perhaps as a tool to make the audience feel something for the deaths of some of the less fleshed out supporting characters. These moments, which border too much on the melodramatic, slightly hinder the pace of the film as it progresses, and defuses some of the later action sequences of their impact. Nonetheless, the film is highly entertaining and packed with well executed action scenes which at their best are gripping and exciting. Though not the most original of ideas, and despite lacking the more technically accomplished direction of other Korean genre filmmakers such as Kim Jee-Woon or Bong Joon-Ho, TRAIN TO BUSAN is an enthralling and exciting action movie, and another fine addition to the recent wave of excellent genre films exported by South Korea.

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