Camellia Peebles
The apocalypse in Last Train to Busan begins as a footnote. A truck passes a lax quarantine checkpoint that should not have waved it through, hits a deer on an empty road, and drives on. The deer gets up. Its eyes have gone white. This is how the film announces what kind of story it is going to be, and it is worth noticing that no human being sees it happen. The disaster is already loose in the world, spreading through the gaps nobody is watching, long before anyone on the train to Busan understands that the country behind them is dying. That is the film’s first and most durable idea: catastrophe does not arrive with a warning. It slips in through the checkpoint that got lazy, the sick woman who boarded at the last second, the leak in a biotech district that a fund manager’s own company helped bankroll. By the time the systems admit there is a problem, the problem is on the train with you.
Ten years on, the thing that startles most is how little Train to Busan has aged, and the reason is almost entirely analog. The infected in this film move like nothing else in the genre, and they do it without the digital crutches that date lesser zombie movies within a season. The turning is a convulsion, a full-body seizure of snapping joints and limbs bending the wrong way, and then they are up and sprinting, fast and blind and terrible. Watching a young athlete rise at the Daejeon station and twist his whole body around in a motion that reads as street dance is not an accident of perception. It is street dance. The movement was designed by Jeon Young, a member of Korea’s only bone-breaking crew, a rhythmic contortionist style, and the background performers trained for months to find their own individual ways of moving wrong. For anyone who has spent time thinking about Korean choreography culture, the crews, the discipline, the way dance is treated as a serious craft and a serious career, this is the film’s quiet masterstroke: its zombies come out of the same tradition that produces the country’s dancers, and they are choreographed with the same rigor. CGI multiplies the hordes and extends the exteriors, but the horror itself is human bodies, drilled, doing something no animation has matched.
The film is generous, too, in a way that is easy to miss because it looks like realism. Where a K-drama would fill these seats with sculpted, flawless leads, Yeon Sang-ho casts faces you would pass on the street, an ordinary cross-section of people riding a normal train on a normal morning. That ordinariness is the whole engine of the dread. When the everyman across the aisle turns, it lands harder because he looked like a real person and not a star, and because the film has quietly assembled, carriage by carriage, a complete sample of a society: a workaholic financier and his neglected daughter, a working-class husband and his pregnant wife, a pair of elderly sisters, a high school baseball team, a homeless man everyone would rather not look at, and a corporate executive who will become the film’s true villain. It is a Noah’s Ark of a movie, one of every kind, and like the Ark it is finally a story about who deserves to reach dry land.
The horror here is not really the dead. It is the living, and specifically the ones who decide, over and over, that their own survival is worth more than anyone else’s. The film draws its cruelest line not between human and infected but between selfishness and sacrifice, and it runs that line straight down the class ladder. Seok-woo, the fund manager played by Gong Yoo of Squid Games, begins the film as a man who tells his own child to look out for herself. When his daughter, Su-an, gives up her seat to an elderly woman, he corrects her, this is a tough time, you need to think of yourself, and the child looks at him and says the thing that will haunt the rest of the movie: you only care about yourself. She is right, and she was right before the apocalypse ever started. He is a man who has bought her the same gift three times because he does not know her well enough to remember, and the outbreak simply exposes a selfishness that was always there.
Against him the film sets Sang-hwa, the burly, blunt, working-class husband played by Ma Dong-seok, who is everything Seok-woo is not: instinctively brave, instinctively generous, a man who throws his own body between the horde and strangers without appearing to weigh it. Their partnership, two men from opposite ends of Seoul who would never have spoken in ordinary life, is the warm center of the film, and it is built through the particular comedy of men who cannot say what they feel. When Sang-hwa fishes for a thank-you, “aren’t you glad you got to see your kid again because of me?” Seok-woo can only deflect into a joke about his tacky ringtone. He cannot yet say the sincere thing. The whole arc of the film is him learning to, and it costs him everything to get there.
Sang-hwa’s death is the film’s peak, and I want to be honest that nothing after it, not even the hero’s, quite equals it. He is bitten holding a door shut so the others can get through, the selfless man dying while the selfish crowd cowers safe behind their barricade, and it destroyed me, because the film had made him so plainly, uncomplicatedly good. That barricade is the movie’s moral climax. On the far side of it, a car of survivors led by the executive Yong-suk refuses to let Seok-woo’s group in, insisting they might be infected, though anyone paying attention to the film’s own rules knows this is a lie: the turn takes seconds, and these people have no injuries and have not turned, so they are obviously clean. The infection excuse is selfishness wearing the mask of caution. There is a real distinction the film understands here, between the selfish and the merely logical. Refusing to open a door onto an active horde is logical. Barricading uninjured, uninfected people out of a safe car at no cost to yourself is not caution. It is just cruelty, and the film knows it, and it makes the cruelty collect its debts.
Collect it does, sometimes gloriously. When one of the elderly sisters dies because of that cowardice, the surviving sister looks at the safe, smug crowd who caused it, decides she is done, and opens the door to let the dead in on them. It is the film’s most cathartic beat, grief turned to judgment, the movie’s central image of the door and who is allowed through it flipped into an instrument of retribution. The people who lived by exclusion die by a door opened at them. The homeless man, meanwhile, the lowest-status person on the train, the one nearly turned away at an earlier threshold simply for being homeless, ends the film giving his life to hold back the horde so a pregnant woman and a child can escape. The man society discarded has more courage in him than every executive in a suit. That is the film’s argument, stated as plainly as it can state it: decency has nothing to do with status, and the powerful are the likeliest to trade other people’s lives for their own.
None of which is to say the film is flawless, and it is in the last twenty minutes that it strains. Yong-suk, so effective early as a recognizable, plausible coward, curdles in the third act into something closer to a cartoon, a human-shield-grabbing, girl-throwing engine of manufactured tragedy, and the film asks us, as he finally turns and dies, to feel a flicker of pity it has not earned. The teenage romance, sweet but under built, pays off in a death that arrives too fast to fully land, because the film never quite convinced me the boy even liked the girl until he was cradling her as she turned. And the movie kills so relentlessly in its final stretch that logic occasionally slips, the train conductor abandoning his post to help, of all people, the man who has been feeding others to the zombies, which raises the small question of who is now driving the train. These are the complaints of someone who loved the film, but they are real. Its emotional architecture is slightly top-heavy: it spends its finest card on Sang-hwa and never tops him.
Seok-woo’s death is the completion of everything, thematically the most important moment in the film, and I confess I understood it more than I felt it, which may be the price of Sang-hwa having wrung me out an hour earlier. Bitten protecting his daughter and the pregnant widow he has taken under his care, the once-selfish man makes his final choice a selfless one: he gets them to safety, and then, already turning, he pries his traumatized daughter off him, steps toward the edge of the moving train, and in his last lucid seconds remembers holding Su-an as a newborn, the father he was always too busy to be. He dies so she will never have to watch him become a monster. The man who said look out for yourself ends by making sure his child never sees the worst of him. It is the whole journey, from selfishness to sacrifice, closed in a single step off a train.
I will say, watch it in Korean and watch it undubbed, because the performances only fully exist in the original. A dub would hand you the words and throw away the acting, and the acting here is extraordinary, most of all in Gong Yoo, whose voice actually cracks when he confronts the man about the barricade, “you killed them!” the exact texture of grief and rage that no dub could reproduce. There is a further pleasure for anyone watching with the language, the small culturally specific beats the subtitles flatten, teenagers comparing their heights in the middle of the apocalypse, the recurring figure of the frantic, unreasonable older man whipping a crowd toward its worst instincts. And there is a genre resonance worth naming, Gong Yoo’s beauty is doing real work here, the same magnetism he would later weaponize as the Recruiter in Squid Game, except here it is bent toward earning our forgiveness for a bad father rather than luring the desperate to their deaths. Either way, the handsome face is the delivery system. It always is.
The film ends where its whole thesis has been heading. Outside the tunnel to Busan, soldiers have orders to shoot anything that approaches, one last institution defaulting to kill-first, and the child and the pregnant woman are walking toward them in the dark. Then Su-an begins to sing, the song she had been practicing all film to perform for the father who was always too busy to come, a Hawaiian farewell, Aloha ‘Oe, until we meet again. The human sound is the proof she is still human, and a soldier chooses, against his orders, to lower his weapon and let them through. That is the film’s final and best idea: institutions fail, the systems lie, the safe zones are traps, but an individual can still choose mercy, and that choice is everything. The Ark reaches dry land carrying only the future, a child and an unborn baby, and it costs a terrible price to get them there, more than I wanted it to, an orphaned girl singing a goodbye over everyone she lost. It is bleak and it is honest and it earns its devastation. If there is ever a zombie apocalypse, please let me be patient zero at Gong Cha to avoid such beautiful carnage. As an American teacher in Seoul, I’d have no chance. However — I do want whatever free promotional keychain they are giving out that month before I turn. Everyone on this train would understand the impulse. They were, right up to the end, comparing heights and peeling eggs and hoping to see someone they loved one more time.
