Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 11 (Train To Busan)

(Just a heads-up, I do kind of "spoil" stuff about this film in this writeup, so if you have an interest after the first paragraph, see the film. It's good.)

Oh my good God. You have to understand, I just sort of picked this one while looking up foreign spooky cinema. All I knew going in was that it was a South Korean movie with a titular train, presumably going to Busan, and that there were zombies. Alright, said I. I can deal with a zombie movie. Sure, by this point I'm more attuned to the subversions and swerves that other pieces of zombie media go for where they focus on things other than the miserable and visceral end of society as they know it. I can handle something more straight-laced. I won't love it, but it will probably be competent enough to give me some stuff to talk about and I only need to bullshit for a few hundred words anyway. Fuck it, let's take the train. So it was that I threw on the movie, and the inciting incident for getting on the train is a workaholic dad with a strained relationship with his daughter. She wants to see her mom, who's separated from this shit of a dad, and so he begrudgingly takes her on a train ride and then we got Zombie Time.

In a moment of calm after everything goes to hell in a handbasket, though, , there was a moment which made me sit up. The little girl gives up her seat for an older lady, and the dad tells her she didn't have to do that: that in a crisis like this, it's best to look after yourself first. Wait. Oh shit, wait. The movie's doing a thing here. Is it... could it be actively rejecting selfish lone wolf bullshit and grim practicality during a zombie apocalypse? Is it actually advocating for being a good person even in crisis, letting empathy and kindness take charge instead of selfishness and throwing others to the wolves? Oh, it is. You bet your ass it is. This zombie train movie is preaching the same scripture as the other most impactful pieces of media in recent years for me. Oh my God there might be something to this shit.

It goes even beyond that, though! The dad is a fund manager and called out on being a shitty capitalist by one or two characters, but there's also this corporate executive on the train who starts taking charge. He is making all the tough "needs of the many" choices that you'd expect from the typical zombie movie, leaving doomed people to die and not letting others in because they might have been bit. The film is not on this asshole's side, and you very quickly grow to hate him. He manages to turn everyone else on the train away from the small group of survivors who got away from zombies, exiling them to the next car. Typical mob mentality horseshit... and then everyone who went along with this gets fucked by zombies. This man somehow continues to survive, and he does it by routinely shoving other people into the path of zombies so that he can get away. He absolutely sucks, the literal sacrificing of other people both a metaphor for being a capitalist shitheel and a condemnation of that mentality in a zombie crisis.

He gets his in the end, but it is not without cost. Not just the people he lets die, but our protagonist workaholic dad gets bitten by him while trying to save his daughter and a pregnant woman. The final goodbye between the dad and daughter, and him thinking about the day she was born as the zombification takes hold, is some of the most heartwrenching shit I have ever seen in a zombie film. Sweet Christ. The ending is bittersweet, but it almost pulls a Night Of The Living Dead on you and for a moment you're wondering if they will actually pull the trigger on this, literally and metaphorically. They don't, and it's certainly something. Good god, this was an incredible film. 

I hardly mentioned the zombies themselves, but everything about them is fast as shit. Not just the speed at which they attack and give chase, but even the infection itself is fast as hell: someone who gets chomped in the throat will be up in seconds to do the zombie thing. The way they all run in a horde and trip over themselves and are just relentless is something to behold. I could say a lot more, but sometimes it's best to leave things unsaid. If you can handle the zombie thing, this one is absolutely worth the time. It almost rivals Zombie Land Saga for how it handles empathy and kindness in the face of zombies, and coming from me? That's high praise indeed.