Busan is about to get the nastiest of deliveries on a two hour “Train To Busan”. The investment manager Seok Woo (Yoo Gong) is a divorced man that lives in Seoul, with his daughter Soo-an (Soo-an Kim) and his mother. Seok Woo is a selfish man and neglects Soo-an that misses her mother that lives in Busan. On Soo-an’s birthday, she asks to visit her mother and Seok Woo travels with her with the intention of returning after lunch. They board the fast train KTX and a sick woman also boards another wagon. During the journey, the woman attacks a train staff and soon all the passenger in the wagon are attacked turning into zombies. Soon Seok Woo realizes that there is a zombie outbreak in South Korea and together with the passenger Sang Hwa (Dong-Seok Ma), who is traveling with his pregnant wife Sung Gyeong (Yu-Mi Jung), they isolate the safe front wagons from the infected ones. Along their journey, the non-infected passengers have to fight the zombies and the selfishness of the human being. “Train To Busan” is directed by Sang-Ho Yeon, and is rated R for brief scenes of blood/gore and heightened scenes of peril.

I’m a little late on hopping the “Train To Busan”, but the newest Asian zombie flick is a high-speed thriller that doesn’t have to settle for some of the tireless cliches that has reduced the genre to predictable, re-heated cinema. There are many things that Sang-Ho Yeon does well in the picture that can be appreciated from an original storytelling aspect, but it’s in his artistic direction where he gives us something fresh and admirable to add emphasis on something that would otherwise be taken as another B-grade horror flick that falls between the cracks of American release. Yeon definitely knows how to add dimensions to even the most claustrophobic of situations, and the way he breezes through this train is definitely not something to be underplayed. A real director can do so much with so little, and the setting of a train no matter how long can always be quite a handicap in the versatility of a script. I particularly enjoyed his continuous shots up and down the aisles that constantly followed the action through long storyboards of choreography. His style behind the lens gives us a dual offering of handheld and shaky camera effects that always feel like they are both being used equally at the right place and time. This is a director who is new to me, but someone who I will be looking for in future releases, and I hope his spell under Asian horror isn’t limited to just this initial offering.

One thing that I came to admire was a lot of the differences that this screenplay takes on to distance itself from other zombie films that have become as cold and distasteful as the very flock they are depicting. This is a movie surprisingly without a lot of blood or gore to it, and it proves that while this movie is a very light R-rating, there is enough room in the genre to do things right by PG-13 standards. The angles of the camera play hand-in-hand with what the director wants you to imagine and depict in your own mind, because that is where the terror musters at the most brutal. There’s also a strong undercurrent of emotional subplots here that up the stakes not only on the characters, but the urgency in time that each character has with one another. The main plot entails a distant workaholic Father and his daughter, and their relationship is one we are constantly rooting for despite the world crumbling down around them. This epidemic offers a strong transformation for our main male lead, and gives him a waking up of what is important despite years of playing the opposite. The film also offers a wide range of character exposition for some supporting cast that adds depth and detail to your investment in them, and doesn’t let them settle for being just another body count. What I found quite intriguing is that no character is the same by the end of the film for better or worse, and this quality time spent with each of them adds greater meaning when they survive a tense situation or when they have to finally say goodbye to us and their loved ones.

For nearly a two hour sit, “Train To Busan” leveled me in more strengths than weaknesses. It would certainly be easy for Yeon as a screenwriter to settle for tropes and outcomes that trigger predictability, but his tempo is constantly moving, offering very little downtime for the audience to breathe or rest, similar to our very characters who halt death at every stop. The setup does feel repetitive on a few occasions during the second act, and I could’ve used a sequence or two shaved off to make the impact of the zombie attacks feel that much more meaningful in spreading it out, instead of so often. Thankfully, the final forty minutes of the movie changes up the setting for a pulse-setting finale that is inevitably pleasing. There’s a lot of solid tension building when some surprises happen late in the movie, promoting the uncertainty of what lies behind every corner. What was impressive to me was that even the final frame of the movie is used for tension, a period that would normally be the triumph of our surviving cast. This relayed to me what I already knew; Yeon never stops constructing those scenes of irritation, and for that fact alone Busan never misses its stop.

Gong and Kim are an irresistible charm as the Father and Daughter duo whose rocky relationship is the foreground for what tests them mentally and physically over the next two hours. For a child actress, Kim is well beyond her years, offering a steady display of tears and emotion that triggers the parental instincts in all of us. Gong too relishes in the relatability to a character that doesn’t need the Superman transformation by the end of the movie to make us understand his love and compassion for his little girl. His character feels human, and the emphasis on that fact first helps us understand his thought process and risky behavior one more than one occasion. Gong himself as a character feels reserved and well-maintained despite everything, and it’s clear that his strength lies in his intelligence as opposed to his brute strength. Some of the supporting cast was slightly underwhelming. It’s clear that not much of a casting call was made to cast some of the zombie extras, who on more than one occasion were caught smiling or smirking during random close-ups. That lack of commitment slightly took me out of a couple of the attack sequences, but I didn’t fault much against them as it’s clear they’re all amateur extras.

Coming down the tracks with ferocious force, despite little blood, gore or horror tropes, “Train To Busan” is first class zombie cinema that is purely entertaining on nearly every end of the spectrum. In Yeon, we find a writer and director who feels very hands-on in only his third live action presentation to date. His emotional subtext will tug at your heart while his army of biters is feasting on your limbs. Satisfying thrills in compact settings that never hurls off of the tracks.

7/10