From Train to Busan to Hope: Italian theaters (and streaming platforms) are preparing for a wave of fantasy blockbusters, frenetic zombies and arthouse thrillers signed by the masters of Seoul.
Arrived in 2016, Train to Busan left quietly. The public wasn’t ready yet. No one could have predicted what would happen just four years later: a global pandemic would kill 15 million people and transform neighbors into potential plague spreaders, causing fear and suspicion in society and at the same time unleashing the best and worst human instincts. Ten years later, this Korean film will also be released in Italy on September 2nd, thanks to Tucker Filmand seeing it for the first time awakens echoes of Covid, but also makes us understand why, even today, it is one of the best zombie movies ever made.
An accident at a biotechnology company releases a virus that transforms people into beasts that want to bite healthy people to transmit the disease. As the epidemic spreads in Korea, some characters find themselves unaware on a train from Seoul to Busan: Seok-woo (Gong Yoo) is a wealthy, divorced and work-obsessed fund manager, clearly incapable of taking care of his little daughter, who reluctantly agrees to accompany her on the train to her mother. Here he will meet the generous but rude Sang-hwa, a worker who despises the rich and pays every attention to his beautiful pregnant wife, but also the young baseball star Young-guk and the cheerleader Jin-hee as well as the egocentric and arrogant bus company manager Yong-suk. When an infected woman boards the train, the apocalypse soon spreads among the carriages, forcing the few survivors to do their best to avoid being bitten by the horde of infected people who want to invade every carriage, in a film which, in addition to exploring the genre, highlights, between acts of heroism and selfishness, the different characters of those who face the catastrophe.
The social metaphor of the infected according to Yeon Sang-ho
“No one is born good or bad and often, when a tragedy occurs, many people land on one of the two shores by pure chance,” the director explains to Panorama Yeon Sang-ho. «Many others, however, simply blame it on bad luck. It’s sad to admit it, but this attitude, this shirking of individual responsibility, is quite present in Korea. And, although Train to Busan is a genre film, I would like it to lead viewers to reflect on it. After all, I chose zombies precisely because they can embody various social nuances: they are not monsters, they are just infected and transformed human beings.ruled by a virusyes”.
Although in an Asian version, Train to Busan brings the genre back to its glories George A. Romerowhich used the living dead to criticize American society. It remains an adrenaline-filled thriller with horror tinges, above all thanks to some elements: first of all the setting which focuses on the narrow spaces of the train corridors, where a toilet or a luggage rack can become a safe refuge; then «the idea of making a high-speed film without too many editing cuts», as the director himself explains. Finally, the intuition to create zombies different from those seen before: no longer slow and staggering corpses, but infected ones traversed by a frenetic fervor, created «by hiring a team of dancers to create specific choreographies for the film, training the extras with strange dances, made up of unnatural movements».
The invasion of Korean cinema on Italian screens
The release of Train to Busan is the first of a series of Korean films arriving in Italy in the coming months, representing the cinematography that more than any other resembles the American one, made up of spectacular films even if often more intelligent and entertaining than the Stars and Stripes ones, in the wake of successes such as Old Boy, Parasites or No Other Choice (but also from the cult TV series Squid Game).
Films that can be admired in Italy even when they are not released in cinemas Florence Korea Film Fest of Florence, scheduled for March, and al Far East Film Festival of Udine, at the end of April. In any case, the horror-tinged fantasy blockbuster arrives on Mubi on November 5th Hopealready in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, which stages 2 hours and 40 minutes of relentless chases and fights between a group of citizens and alien monsters in a rural village on the border between the two Koreas, a clear metaphor for the fear of invasion. A film full of digital effects in which two international stars such as Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander also appear and is the work of Na Hong-jin, former director of the acclaimed Goksung. Then will come Colony, a new film based on zombies (also zombies) by Yeon Sang-ho, who has become a master of the genre: a fun action in which a former employee fired from a biotechnology company returns to take revenge by infecting the CEO with a virus that transforms into cannibals, while claiming that he cannot be killed because his own blood contains the antibodies necessary to stop the infection.
From action nightmares to author stories
However, not all the cinema that comes from Seoul is action and there is also room for some arthouse titles and documentaries. At the Venice Film Festival – and arriving on Netflix from 6 November – there is Possible Love, by the maestro Lee Chang-dong. The film tells the dangerous relationship between two couples, a story of class division and the search for happiness. Seoul Guardians, the documentary that tells the story of the night of chaos on December 3, 2024, when the president Yoon Suk Yeol declared the martial lawaccusing the Democratic Party of colluding with North Korean communists.
