Bullet Train Busan.

Rating: 10/10 (15 January 2017)

Talking to a fellow IMDber about what his top film of 2016 was,I got told about a tantalising Korean Horror epic that he had seen at a film festival. Deciding to hold a 2016 Horror double bill viewing this weekend (with the other being the gritty Brit zombie title The Girl with All the Gifts) I booked a ticket for the Busan train.
The plot:
Putting all his attention on work, Seok-Woo barely sees his daughter Su-an.Sick of hardly seeing her dad,Su-an demands Seok-Woo to take her to Busan,so that Su-an can spend her birthday with her mum/his ex- wife. Taking it on the chin,Seok-Woo books the tickets for him and his daughter. Just before the train departs,a convulsing women jumps on the train.Noticing a large bite mark,Seok-Woo,Su-an soon find their destination to change from Busan to a zombie apocalypse.
View on the film:
Spending (most) of a two hour running time on a train,writer/director Sang-ho Yeon turns down a comfy seat to lay the track for a white-knuckle ride. Drawn away from Anima for his live action debut,Yeon & cinematographer Hyung-deok Lee brilliantly close the passengers to the chaos on board with ultra-stylish claustrophobic shots,which look from above at the limited room the passengers have for zombie-free air. Mounting up the zombies,Yeon brilliantly chews practical,in-camera effects with CGI shrieks,howling from Yeon keeping the gore to a minimum,to instead carve out an anxiety-drench Horror atmosphere,spun from the disturbing fast/slow spider-like movement of the undead.
Watching the world die out as they drive by,the screenplay by Yeon eats up spectacular horror set-pieces with precisely hit personal human tragedy. Taking pit stops on the way to the poetic final destination,Yeon rolls the zombies in with piles of them darting all over the empty stations,with the unlucky pick-ups the train makes leading to some tasty shocks. Looking in at every carriage,Yeon cleverly uses the sweet drama between Seok Woo and Soo-an (played by the fantastic Yoo Gong and Soo-an Kim) as a foundation to keeping a close watch at how everyone on the other carriages fight to keep the zombie train on track.