Train to Busan

Yeon Sang-ho’s 2016 film sets rules for its monsters early: they depend on sight and they stall in the dark. The tunnel sequence is then built entirely out of those two rules, so the picture keeps the contract it wrote for itself. Structurally it is a series of door problems. A small group must move forward through carriages while the people in the next one decide whether to open, and the real opposition is a fellow passenger rather than the infection. The director arrived here from animation. His earlier animated feature was the first Korean animation invited to Cannes, screening in the Directors’ Fortnight in 2012, and the animated companion piece Seoul Station, set in the same outbreak, is also his. The zombie movement was built with a choreographer who drilled performers twenty or thirty at a time in a studio the size of a carriage. The landscape outside the windows came from LED panels behind a set modelled on a real high speed train. The film opened in the midnight screenings at Cannes and passed eleven million admissions in Korea. A good fit if you want to watch stated rules honoured exactly when the tunnel arrives. Not for you if a child in danger, and long scenes of passengers refusing a door, would be hard going.