“Why Don’t Zombies Just Eat One Another?” and Other Thoughts on the Train to Busan

Train to Busan finally answers the age old question, "How does one escape a horde of zombies on a moving train?"

Photo: Next Entertainment World

On a one-lane highway just outside a quarantine zone checkpoint in South Korea, a driver hurries to answer his flip phone. With the device beyond reach, he leans down, brushing it with his fingertips. In doing so, he speeds his truck into a deer crossing the road.

Like anyone would, he gets out. He checks the damage for a moment, but quickly moves on - presumably to take his call. We, however, remain fixed on the street which now contains a streak of blood down its center. Beside the fresh roadkill, the red marks are thick, but as they stretch down the faded blacktop toward the fleeing car, they thin out. 

At a distance, we see the Train to Busan’s first member of the undead twist back to life - peeling itself from the concrete like it’s learning to walk but in reverse. As its eyelids snap open to reveal a set of milky orbs, the first of many, “Oh, hell yeah!”s escapes my mouth. 

From there, we’re given the classic action-horror set up. Our protagonists (Seok-woo and his daughter who kind of hates him, Su-an) must get through a world-altering event (the zombie apocalypse) to a hyperspecific location (Busan) where they’ll obtain an item or find a person of significance (Su-an’s mom). Because it’s also a film about divorced dads struggling to reconnect with their kids in horrific circumstances, War of the Worlds springs to mind. 

When Seok-woo and Su-an board the titular train to Busan, everything appears to be business as usual.

It’s only after the doors slide shut and seal the passengers within the claustrophobic cars, that we see what’s happening outside: An army of the dead are amassing, Night King-style. And because an infected human found her way inside, we’ll soon experience why setting the action in the tubes of a train was so effective. Only in this kind of environment could you understand the impact that hordes of zombies could have. Cramming down aisles, slamming into glass, clawing through the living as a sniveling, flesh-hungry blob.

For most of the film, you have that feeling in your stomach like when you were younger and you had to skitter down the hall to your room before whatever was following you from the bathroom caught up. Quick! Shut the door and hop into bed and everything will be okay! But in Train to Busan, you need more than a door to stop the monsters. 

Sure, these zombies can’t operate handles and seem to only crave what they can see, but they’re also relentless. They’ll break down doors, punch through windows that surely have several layers of glass, and thanks to makeup artists and movement coaches, they’ll totally gross you out. 

While I enjoyed almost every gory moment of this and generally stand on the side of “zombies rule, show me more zombies,” one of the film’s faults is that it comes dangerously close to overplaying its decaying hand. Though it’s most certainly done to show how impending doom can turn a completely individualistic man toward collectivism, by the third or fourth round of zombie-wrestling, it began to feel a bit like the levels of a video game. 

Luckily, the film is clever enough to realize this and, like the driver we met in the opening scene, moves on - in this case to a finale that perfectly sums up Train to Busan: explosive, thrilling, and surprisingly emotional.