Zombie Politics

I can tell you from personal experience that Yeon Sang-ho’s zombie extravaganza Train to Busan is the perfect film to screen after witnessing the shambolic horror of the Trump coronation in Cleveland.

It’s just one easy step from watching a convention centre full of people stupidified (that’s a word I just invented) by nativist ideology and mass hysteria to a contemplating a viral outbreak that turns humans into ravening flesh-eating monsters.

Even if you’re not entirely convinced that the end days are shuffling into view, it’s hard, upon awakening each morning, not to think: “I wonder what madness will ensue today?” Can a zombie Armageddon be that far off? Maybe not!

Romping, chomping zombie films have been set in almost every corner of the globe, but this newest iteration takes place in Korea, and provides new nuances to be explored. The country’s complex past and uneasy future pop up regularly throughout the movie, whether it’s two elderly ladies talking about the good old days of reeducation camps or an embedded critique of the Korean government’s failure to contend with an outbreak of the MERS virus in 2015. Social commentary on the wages of predatory capitalism is there, but so is a good old-fashioned morality play.

Zippity zombies

The mixture of both old and new in Yeon Sang-ho’s film is helped along by his animator’s eye for visual detail, and above all human movement. The creatures in Busan are not the slow moving stumble bums of old, but the fast moving variety that first popped up in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later. Speedy zombies have largely replaced their shuffling progenitors and Sang-ho gives them an extra twist, by literally contorting bodies into poses so violently extreme that they look barely human. In certain scenes, the survivors look like they are being chased by a host of inverted commas.

What event precipitated this mass murderous plague? Earlier films have placed the blame on comets, shadowy government agencies, but this time it is a chemical leak at a biotech research centre. The first victim is a Bambi-lookalike killed on the road by an oblivious truck driver. But before you can say, “Holy Romero!” the sweet little deer has gone rabid, white-eyed and snarling. Yeek! Head for the hills. Oh, no, the hills are full of deer. Run to the city. Oh no, the army has been overrun by the virus, and the entire country devouring itself! What is there to do but catch a train out of town?

As in the Romero films, one of the greatest pleasures is derived from setting (suburban mall, crumbling old farm house, or underground bunker). Plunk in an assembled cast of characters, and like a rat maze experiment, observe the action. Who lives and who dies isn’t nearly as interesting as how humans treat each other inside the crucible of terror that has sprung up around them. In this aspect, a train is ideal, with its segmented containers of population – all helpfully delineated by class, and economic station. Like Bong Joon-ho’s earlier film Snowpiercer (also set on a high speed locomotive) the train is a microcosm of social mores, but also a vehicle to move the story forward. It is both prison and refuge, host and deliverer, taking its cargo into an unknown future.

So who’s onboard?

First off, we have Seok-woo (Gong Yoo) and his adorable daughter Su-an (Kim Su-an). Newly divorced, umbilically attached to his phone, and obsessed with work, Seok-woo is instantly identifiable as a type -- a careerist hedge fund manager who preys on the financial weakness of others. He is, as another character says, “a parasite.” The only person who seems to like him is his elderly mother. Naturally, she bites it.

But inside Seok-woo’s hollowed-out shell, some human feeling still exists, and he agrees to take his little girl to Busan to see her mother. Their trip coincides with something going terribly wrong in Seoul. As father and daughter make their way to the station, heavily armoured convoys of military vehicles are racing towards some unseen disaster. Buildings are on fire, and chaos is erupting in the streets. Something is afoot, and it is moving quickly.

Soon enough, we are introduced to the rest of the train’s passengers, including a working class toughie named Sang-hwa (Ma Dong-seok) and his heavily pregnant wife Sung-kyu (Jung Yu-mi). There is also an evil Tycoon named Yong-suk (Kim Eui-sang), and a team of teenage baseball players who all look as though they came straight from a K-Pop audition. The star player is a sensitive lad named Young-guk (Choi Woo-sik), who is glommed onto by Jin-hee, a flirty girl in a too-short skirt and a forward manner (played by actual K-Pop superstar An So-hee).

Add in a catatonic hobo hiding in one of the bathrooms, and a terrified young woman, with a tourniquet on one leg – our own little patient zero – and the passenger list is complete.

Riding the zombie express

As the train leaves the station, Su-an catches a momentary glimpse of a savage attack on the platform. And soon the young woman with the bloodied rag around her thigh is growing a nest of blackened veins, twisting her spine into s-curves, and spewing weird goop. It is a decidedly brisk introduction to the outbreak.

As the train picks up speed, the contagion begins to spread. It is the viral equivalent of this person bites that person, and she bites two friends, and so on and so on. Soon enough a goodly portion of the people at the rear of the train are snapping like sharks and piling on any red-blooded creature to tear them shreds.

Meanwhile, in the front cars, the other passengers are blissfully dozing, reading or watching the civic unrest unfold on the television screens above their seats. Dread spreads, pooling inside of small moments, and distant rumbles. When little Su-an visits the bathroom, she is the first to witness the onrushing horror from the back of the train. 

Part of the painful pleasure of zombie movies is to figure out their particular idiosyncrasies. How can they be killed, what are their weaknesses? In this case, the creatures cannot see very well in the dark and they have an attraction to sound, especially super cheesy cell phone ring tones. Here the nature of the space itself adds invention and novelty. Director Yeon Sang-ho’s visual style occasionally borders on the cartoonish, but he also possesses a gleeful way with the camera. Tiny train washrooms become a fulcrum of action, as do the doors between train compartments.

Like the work of Bong Joon-ho and Na Hong-jin, whose film The Wailing went in curious new directions, Train to Busan is enjoyable for its flexibility of tone. The story moves fluidly between comedy, horror and bathos. This level of extremity is anchored by solid performances, in particular Kim Su-an who is never anything less than entirely convincing, whether she is screaming for her father or singing Aloha ‘Oe as snot and tears stream down her face. (There should be a film award established for little girls who can scream the house down, although it is a toss-up between Kim Su-an in Busan and Kim Hwan-hee in The Wailing, who could split atoms with the power of her lungs.)

Distinctly Korean in flavour

A few set pieces in the film are almost magnificent in their insanity. A sequence in which a long string of zombies attach themselves like rope of ants, to a locomotive is stunning its visual audacity and Looney Tunes punch. There is a particular quality to Korean genre film, as distinctive as kimchi – spicy, sour and oddly addictive. Try watching a little girl sing in a tiny quavering voice, while a solder aims down his rifle barrel, preparing to shoot her in the brainpan, and try not to feel your own head explode from the convergence of different emotions.

As the films winds its way to a suitably operatic conclusion, stuffed with enough sentiment and horror that it threatens to explode and cover the screen with gore and tears, it is hard to withhold admiration for a filmmaker with so little fear of excess.

But back to the larger issue at hand for a moment. The social commentary of zombie films has been going since the day the George Romero employed the undead to examine and explore issues of race, corruption, and consumerism. You name it, zombies have been thrown at it to chew away at whatever social ill we want to talk about, but can’t. So, it is here as well.

While Train to Busan lacks the subtlety of earlier films, it still has a point to make. Selfishness and greed are ascribed as a root cause of the outbreak, and self-sacrifice the only path to survival. Is there anything more than that? Like World War Z before it, Busan depicts the zombie hordes like an insect infestation. They swarm and clump and cluster like so many bugs. This aspect taps into something fundamentally horrifying. It is nature gone wrong, biblical in its origins and deep-rooted. Scale as horror.

At the beginning of the film, we are made aware of mass fish die-offs, environmental collapse, Earth’s life systems sacrificed to profit. Good old global capitalism keeps devouring everything in its path, husbands and wives, parents and children and entire baseball teams. We are eating ourselves alive.

Which brings me back to the RNC conference, so full of wide-eyed maniacs with their toothy grins and bloody certitude. They thrive in what we’ve come to call the red states. Nice metaphor.

I am fairly sure Donald Trump would eat your face off, given the chance.