Tonight’s horror film is Korean animated zombie feature “Seoul Station” from 2016. This is the animated prequel to incredibly good zombie film “Train to Busan” that was released earlier in 2016 and along with it’s sequel “Peninsula” from 2020 forms a sort of trilogy. It’s worth noting, much like George Romero’s Night/Dawn/Day trilogy, though based around the same zombie apocalypse, none of the films have any direct ties to each other. None of the characters carry through and each film works perfectly as a stand alone movie. This series all comes from the creative mind of Sang-ho Yeon, who is also the man behind the Netflix series Hellbound (Which is also worth checking out). This is a director/writer to watch out for in years to come.
October Review Challenge – Day 19
Because this is animated and in Korean I can’t make any useful comment on the actors involved, but should you be familiar with Korean voice actors the key voices are provided by: Shim Eun-kyung, Seung-ryong Ryu, Joon Lee and Jang Hyuk-jin. The key character though is Hye-Sun, a young girl that ran away from home and ended up as a prostitute, having run away from that life too she is now on the verge of homelessness only able to stay away from it by hooking up with an abusive boyfriend Ki-woong, a lowlife that refuses to work and wants Hye-Sun to act as a prostitute again, though with the goal of robbing people instead of sleeping with them (Or so he claims).
While we are getting to know Hye-Sun’s story another one is unfolding involving the homeless people squatting in Seoul Station. A homeless man is found by another badly wounded, looking like he has been bitten by someone. His friend who noticed the man bleeding attempts to get help for him, but he is frustrated at every turn being rejected by authorities and pushed around by other homeless people. Eventually he manages to get some pain killers and an energy drink which he takes to his friend, only to find the man dead. When he reports this to the authorities they investigate, but finding the body gone they assume it is crazy homeless people being crazy homeless people. Eventually the homeless man finds his friend apparently alive, but he is then attacked by him.
Zombie Uprising
These events seem to be happening all over and because of their vulnerability and how their actions are ignored by the authorities the zombie plague spreads quickly amongst the homeless. Hye-Sun ends up caught up in it and in fleeing from zombies she finds herself in the police station. The cops though assume the problem is the homeless have all gone crazy and report the situation as such. Meanwhile Ki-woon is confronted by Suk-gyu, who says he is Hye-Sun’s father and demands to know where she is. They too end up caught up in the outbreak and find themselves driving around the city searching for her.
Eventually Suk-gyu finds herself in a barricaded section of the city where many of the survivors, but those survivors are trapped between the zombies and riot police that have mistaken the outbreak for an insurrection. From here I’m keeping quite since talking about the ending in any capacity would really be a spoiler at this stage. So you’ll have to watch to find out what happens.
View From The Bottom
The characters are perhaps a weakness as none of them are especially likeable. You certainly feel sympathy towards Hye-Sun and towards the homeless people, but that is about it. Hye Sun largely just follows other people and often gets them killed when they try to help her. Indeed there would be several more survivors from that night had she simply died the first time a zombie charged for her. That doesn’t mean she’s a bad character and it is likely intentional but I do like to have at least one character I want to survive when watching this kind of film, just to get me more invested in their fate.
The main purpose of this movie though is to look at how a zombie outbreak would impact the bottom end of the societal hierarchy and through that investigate the plight of the homeless and near-homeless in a city where they are basically treated like they are already the living dead. At one point when Hye Sun is travelling with an older homeless man through the underground subway tunnels she breaks down crying and saying she wants to go home (To her father, that she ran away from). The old man too breaks down saying he too wants to go home, but he doesn’t have one and the pair spend a time crying together. It places a contrast where we feel sympathy for both but we also realise the higher level of despair for the old man that has nowhere to even dream of returning to.
How Does It Fare As A Zombie Film?
I’ve always said zombie films need social commentary and this is one that doubles down on that area, but does it well and with it’s choice of social commentary it finds a neat way to give us tragedy too, another key element of these films. The only area in lacks somewhat is the absurdity, but it isn’t totally absent. At one point Suk-gyu and the old man she is travelling with are desperately trying to lift a gate to a subway tunnel to escape an approaching zombie, only to find as the monster draws near it wasn’t a zombie at all but a crazy homeless woman. That scene does a great job of adding humour, but also tragedy and social commentary all at once. That’s the only lighter moment of the movie I can recall however.
The weakest part of this zombie film is the zombies themselves and that is probably down to it being animation. While the animation makes the zombies significantly less scary (and less gory), the format is not really taken advantage of to show us anything that they couldn’t have done in live action. So it seems a waste to me. Maybe it is just down to personal preference, but for me the story is good enough to warrant making it in live action. It is a classic zombie story with an ending worthy of George Romero. However, when I compare this to Train to Busan it becomes clear just how much is lost by doing it in animation.
Conclusion
Overall this is not the classic that Train to Busan was, nor is it quite as good as Peninsula though that is a better comparison. It suffers as a zombie film from being animated and it lacks a bit character wise. However it score a lot of points for story and the clever social commentary. This is a very strong 6.5/10. I may even end up revising it up a notch before the end of October. Had this been done in live action though I think it could have been a 7 or 7.5.
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