Seok-woo is a distant father to his daughter Su-an (10) because he spends most of his time on work as a fund manager. He thus wants to compensate by taking Sun-an on a train to Busan to visit Su-an's mother. However, just then a zombie pandemic breaks out. An infected teenage girl bites the staff and thus they turn into zombies, attacking other passangers. After a lot are killed or turned to zombies, only Su-an, Seok-woo, the pregnant Seong-kyeong with her husband, and a homeless man are left. The husband and the homeless man sacrifice themselves to hold off the zombies. Seok-woo is infected, and spend his last memory thinking of his daughter, before his transformation into a zombie, and his jump from a running train. Seong-kyeong and Su-an arrive to Busan alive, where they are met by soldiers on barricades.
Hyped "Train to Busan" caused a lot of attention, confirming the Korean New Vawe of the 21st century cinema, yet it is overall just a standard zombie flick with only intermittent surprises. The movie starts off with one of said welcomed surprises, when a careless driver runs over a deer on the street with his van, drives off—only for the dead deer to come to life and stand up again, displaying white eyes, confirming it is a "zombie deer". Sadly, the rest is rather routine, with the typical excess of hundreds of zombies with pale make up chasing the human characters across the train, which are tropes and cliches the viewers have seen many times already. Some good ideas break the grey routine: for instance, after it is established that the zombies only attack people when they see them, a pregnant woman, Seong-kyeong, pours water over the door of the train waggon and places newspaper over the glass, blocking the sight, and thus the zombies just stop trying to break the door because they don't "see" the humans on the other side anymore. Another good moment is when the train drives through a tunnel, creating temporary dark which again causes the zombies to stop attacking, because they don't see the humans anymore. On the down side, the rest of the story is comprised of lazy writing, consisting only out of humans kicking and punching the invading zombies, which can only go so far. Here and there some symbolism appears, like when the fund manager is derogatory labelled a "blood sucker", linking him to a "financial zombie" who also just exploits people around him. However, the overlong story doesn't truly lift-off again until the very touching ending, which implies that living like a "spiritual zombie", neglecting your family while you spend all your time just on work, leads to a dead end.
Grade:++
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