JOIN USTrain to Busan (A)
English (originally Korean)
Direction: Yeon Sang-ho
Cast: Gong Yoo, Ma Dong-seok, Kim Su-an, Jung Yu-mi
Train to Busan is the South Korean film that has hit the movie screens of Bengaluru this week. While non-English films from abroad hardly make an impact in the city, Train to Busan has a few things to offer that might attract the city audiences.
It tells the story of a handful of people who are stuck on a train during the outbreak of a zombie menace.
The dire situation brings together this unlikely group of people. A kind young girl, her business-minded father, the self-centred CEO of a company, a working class husband and his pregnant wife, two elderly sisters, and a homeless man.
Train to Busan tells the story of how they try desperately not to get bitten by zombies (and thereby turn zombies themselves) and reach the safety that city of Busan might provide.
In what turns out to be a very gory journey, survival is not always an option. While being peppered with a fair share of cliches, the movie is never uninteresting; the turns are very unexpected and nicely done.
The movie also has a depth that one usually doesn’t expect from a zombie movie. In fact, before the zombies begin jumping on everyone, the movie touches upon complex relationships of a father and daughter, of a pregnant woman and her husband, and of two elderly sisters who depend on and help each other.
While the relationship theme and the zombie theme seem unconnected at first, one question is crucial to this juxtaposition: what becomes of relationship when survival turns so bleak that you can save one of the two, yourself or your loved on? There is no correct answer here: it is a choice between giving up life and survivor’s guilt. This struggle between selfishness and selflessness is dealt with very carefully in the movie.
Something must also be said about the way certain scenes are shot.
For a movie with a death rate of a dozen per second, portraying one more death might not seem like a big deal, but the death of a central character is represented simply by a shadow of the person falling slowly, effortlessly from the shadow of the moving train.
There are some elements in the movie that must be criticised. For one, the film fails miserably when it comes to explaining why the outbreak happened in the first place. A half-hearted attempt to do so misses the mark completely. Also the zombies attack with such bodily vigour that instead of the intended frightening, they often come across as ridiculous.
Yet, considering the fact that most zombie movies are as mindless as the zombies in them, Train to Busan stands out for its mature performances and strong plot.
Do watch!
Roshan H Nair