Train to Busan: An Honest Review (The Zombie Movie That Actually Has a Heart)
By Huzi
File #567 · 3 min read
A freight train rolled through Sialkot as I wrote this — fitting. Train to Busan takes the morning commute, the world's most ordinary thing, and turns it into a pressure cooker of blood, sacrifice and fatherhood. Nearly a decade after its Cannes premiere in May 2016, it remains the zombie film every new one gets measured against.
The quick answer: Still the best zombie film since 28 Days Later, not close: roughly $98 million worldwide on a budget near $8.5 million, no Hollywood names. The train, not the zombies, is the story — which passengers stay human once the price starts climbing. Watch it for Gong Yoo's father arc; forgive the cartoon villain.
Why it refuses to die
The premise is brutally simple. Seok-woo, a workaholic fund manager played by Gong Yoo, takes his young daughter Su-an from Seoul to Busan by KTX to see her mother; an outbreak erupts mid-journey, and the train becomes both refuge and trap.
The zombies are fast, swarming, almost liquid — but they are only the clock. The story is what happens to the people trapped in a metal tube with nowhere to run, and Yeon Sang-ho's gliding camera keeps the geography clear until the space itself does the suspense work.
What works, honestly
- The containment: a KTX carriage exploited to perfection — always-clear geography, no cut-and-run corners.
- Gong Yoo: neither villain nor hero but a tired, self-absorbed father, whose slow education in what matters is the film's spine.
- Ma Dong-seok as Sang-hwa: the tough guy with the pregnant wife who blocks a doorway with his own body — the heart of the picture, baseball bat and all.
- The baseball team: and the cheerleader who stays to turn with the boy she loved rather than run.
- The ending: Su-an singing Aloha Oe in a tunnel, a child's voice deciding who lives.
What does not
Yon-suk, the COO villain played by Kim Eui-sung, is a cartoon — pure greed in a suit, locking survivors out of safe carriages; a braver film would show the frightened human underneath. The leads also survive falls and hordes that should kill them twice over.
| Film | Year | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Train to Busan | 2016 | The benchmark |
| Seoul Station | 2016 | Animated prequel — angrier, more political, rougher |
| Peninsula | 2020 | Skip it: a Mad Max-style heist that lost the soul |
The ghost on board
Learn one piece of history and the film changes shape. In April 2014 the Sewol ferry, carrying 476 people — most of them schoolchildren — capsized off the Korean coast; 304 died, many obeying the intercom instruction to stay put while the crew abandoned ship first.
Train to Busan is full of authorities telling ordinary people to stay put and trust the system while the system fails them, and Seok-woo's own company helped cause the outbreak. This is Korean genre cinema's oldest move, from The Host to Memories of Murder: use the monster to ask who gets sacrificed first, and who decides.
The Sewol shadow teaches that children should never pay for the failures of the powerful — I hold the same prayer for the children of Gaza, who keep paying for other people's decisions.
Ride the real thing
The carriage interiors were a Studio Cube soundstage in Goyang, but Seoul Station and Busan Station are real. The KTX between them takes about two hours forty minutes for roughly 50,000-60,000 won.
Pro tip: Book a left-side window seat for the mountains — and try not to hum Aloha Oe as you pull into Busan.
You do not need Korea for that window-seat feeling. We at HTG Travels plan our own great journey — the drive up the Karakoram Highway from Islamabad towards Hunza and Skardu, glaciers instead of zombies, better chai stops.
Bring the workaholic father; we have talked more than one around with a single photograph. Quotes and itineraries come back fast from the HTG desk on +92 317 5054959.
