Let’s kick this year’s batch of horror reviews off with an easy recommendation. Zombies, confined spaces, and well-defined characters – thumbs up.
Vampires. Kaiju. Haunted Houses. Slashers. ZOMBIES.
The horror genre has an arsenal of well-worn antagonists that it pulls from over and over again, each with their own ready-made themes and tropes, and we seemingly never get tired of them. What separates the filmmakers who have fresh and impactful visions from the ones that traffic in toothless retreads generally has less to do with exciting new ideas, and more with a fundamental understanding of what makes these particular stories work. In this regard, Train to Busan excels. There is zero novel content in the film, but it really taps in to what makes the zombie construct so resilient. Despite the ever-present threat of zombie fatigue, my viewing party was at turns tearful and on the edge of their seats.*
The plot involves a workaholic father and his distant, pre-teen daughter, taking a train to connect with his estranged wife. The zombie apocalypse breaks out en route, and the duo has to navigate the undead, the military, other passengers of various intentions, and the Japan Rail Pass system in order to make it to their hopefully still living family. The characters are all common archetypes with arcs that resolve in traditional ways (recognizing that “traditional resolution” in such films often ends in the decaying stomach cavities of a dozen walking dead). It has all of the hallmarks you would expect from a zombie film: An opening segment where the coming destruction is coyly hinted at; spine-tingling set-pieces where some die and some barely escape; cowardly and cruel humans that turn out to be the real villains of the film. There is a nihilism that has been associated with zombie flicks since the original Night of the Living Dead, and Train to Busan doesn’t flinch in that regard either. What the filmmakers understand, thankfully, is that the nihilism only matters in as much as we care about the characters. The long prelude to disaster is spent becoming invested in them and their clear (albeit predictable) personalities and goals. I can watch countless scenes of sneaking around quietly and barricading doors when they have stakes that I care about. Busan is all about cultivating those stakes, much to its benefit.
I put off watching Train to Busan for a couple of years, despite the recommendation of people whose taste I trust, because I felt like I could predict exactly how it would play out. I was right, actually, but it turns out that it didn’t really matter. Out of the countless versions of this story across film and television, this is one of the best.
* I watched the film with my family, consisting of my wife and three children (ages 13, 8 and 3). Have the demands of this blog desensitized me to the point of exposing my three-year-old to a terrifying horror movie with no way to make sense of the fully-subtitled plot? Yes. Is that a bad thing? That’s a question for her and her therapist to answer in twenty years.
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