Love, Death and Sacrifice in Train to Busan

Editor’s note: This piece contains discussion of illness and grief, and spoilers for the film.

At the beginning of Train to Busan, a little girl asks her single father, a busy and distracted fund manager in Seoul, to take her to Busan on her birthday to see her mother. The father begrudgingly takes her the next day on the early morning train—unaware that a zombie outbreak has just occurred.

From the moment the first zombie-infected person, unnoticed by the other passengers, steps onto that train, we are hurtled along with it on a fast-paced, unrelenting ride: events happen one after another in a domino-like effect, with no extraneous exposition or cutaways, picking up speed until we reach the final destination—of both the train and the film—utterly exhausted.

A critical and box-office success upon its release, Korean director Yeon Sang-ho’s 2016 live-action debut is seeing a revival of sorts thanks to star Gong Yoo’s short but impactful appearance in Netflix’s surprise hit Squid Game, and a mini-trend of Korean zombie TV series such as Netflix’s Kingdom and All Of Us Are Dead. With a US remake also ostensibly in production, it’s worth revisiting what makes Train to Busan such an incredible addition to the zombie genre and what it has to say to all of us.

When I watched Train to Busan for the first time, I had the immediate feeling it was different from other zombie movies I had seen, like Dawn of the Dead or 28 Days Later. I couldn’t pin it down initially until I realised: it’s different because it’s really a film about war, in a very vivid sense. While Dawn of the Dead might be a biting critique of modern consumer society, or 28 Days Later chronicling the collapse of the British social contract, Train to Busan feels far away from an imagined apocalypse. Because the differences are not only in the metaphors used—there’s a fundamentally different vision of what it means to be human.

Train to Busan feels far away from an imagined apocalypse—there’s a fundamentally different vision of what it means to be human.

In these and other movies, despite the devastation brought on by the zombies, it never feels completely terrifying for the characters—there are various scenes where they fight back, ‘badass’ moments where the protagonists become bold and fearless; there is an element of the hero motif conquering the bad guys. Train to Busan, on the other hand, is not particularly gory or violently graphic—indeed it actually plays out more like an action film—but its characters are heart-stoppingly fearful all the time.

This, to me, seems a more realistic portrayal of how most of us might actually react whether in war or in a zombie apocalypse. But more importantly, there is a crucial understanding of human agency that is being underlined here– that it is limited, and in the face of overwhelming catastrophe, sometimes the only thing we are able to do is simply endure. As one YouTube video essay on Korean horror put it: ‘You tend to notice that the goal is to try and survive it, rather than defeat it’ (the monster, the ghost, the supernatural threat).

The confusion, the shock, the country gone to hell overnight also reflects what the conditions of war can demand of us: the tensions that arise between the needs of the collective versus the individual, between the desire to be selfish and the pull to self-sacrifice. My feelings about Train to Busan’s war movie overtones were confirmed by this Twitter thread​: Busan is significant to Koreans as one of the few areas that was not captured by the North Korean army during the Korean War, and thus populated by hundreds of thousands of refugees. Even now, North and South Korea are technically still at war; military service is compulsory for all South Korean men, and large-scale civil defence drills are common. As Don Mee Choi noted in her book DMZ Colony, with approximately 28,000 US troops permanently stationed in the country and the US military still having operational control over South Korean forces, it is ‘perpetually under US military command.’ The threat of war is ever present in South Korea.

In Train to Busan, despite moments of levity, death or the threat of it is often present in every shot, as it is in a real war situation. As philosopher Simone Weil states, referring to Homer’s The Iliad: ‘the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment.’ At the heart of this film is a wrestling with death, both literal and figurative; whether in war or a zombie annihilation, death looms in the foreground in a way that it usually doesn’t in ordinary life. The panic the characters feel in the moment, the speed, the pace, the confusion of not knowing what is actually happening yet still you must act—often making decisions that pivot on being either selfish or selfless. This perpetual awareness of death can make us crazy: ‘The mind is then strung up to a pitch it can stand for only a short time,’ says Weil. ​

The film also reflects what the conditions of war can demand of us: the tensions between the desire to be selfish and the pull to self-sacrifice.

Perhaps it registered for me too, because my family is from South-East Asia and have experienced war. I’ve heard stories from them but I also know this experience on a cellular level as someone whose first three years of life was lived in various refugee camps. I think that’s why the end father-daughter goodbye scene hits so hard; when the protagonist Seok-woo (Gong Yoo) has been bitten by a zombie, he must sacrifice himself before transforming to avoid infecting his daughter. The scene echoes how people in war often have to face unimaginable situations, especially from a child’s point of view. In the young girl’s screams for her father, I recognise both the bewildering incomprehension and the unbearable sadness.

But actually, war or an apocalyptic scenario simply heightens a more mundane truth, one that we often don’t want to think about: the reality of our own inevitable deaths.

The question Train to Busan poses to us is, how will you choose to die?

How will we act when death is chasing us? Yeon’s film suggests that how we deal with this is important. Many of the characters on the train are caricatures of good and bad, often divided along class lines—there is supervillain businessman Yon-suk (Kim Eui-sung), at whose hands many people die as he tries to save himself. There is Seok-woo’s daughter, Su-an (Kim Su-an), a little girl who knows the importance of being kind and caring. A homeless guy (Choi Gwi-hwa), who is either judged or invisible to others, but who ends up sacrificing himself for them. A father-to-be (Ma Dong-seok) who embodies all the elements of a wise figure, along with his pregnant wife (Jung Yu-mi). Finally, there is Seok-woo himself, the self-absorbed single father who, by the end of the movie, understands the true meaning and value of life. Seok-woo starts the film telling Su-an, ‘At a time like this, watch out only for yourself,’ but by the end, he sacrifices his own life trying to save another—not his daughter, but for a stranger on the train.

I didn’t mind the larger-than-life caricature nature of the characters, because they all played a role in contributing to Train to Busan’s wider vision. It’s an example of where effective forms of storytelling don’t always need to have an obsession with creating unique characters. As Matthew Salesses explores in his book ‘Craft in the Real World: Rethinking fiction writing and workshopping’, writing that focuses on character’s psychological realism and character-driven plots often have embedded in them particular notions of the individual, human agency and free will. These ideas of the self originated in the West but is now pervasive and assumed to be universal, where the individual is conceived primarily through the prism of agency and their capacity to change the world around them. In fiction, this usually manifests as a reliance on characters’ actions to move the plot forward. In feedback given to me on my own novel manuscript, I’ve been told that I should give my characters more agency, allowing them to affect their world (and therefore the plot) more; that my protagonist is too passive in allowing the world to affect her.

It is not simply a difference in storytelling modes—at its foundation is a key difference in how personhood, and the individual’s relationship to the world, is conceptualised. Because​ in Train to Busan, despite moments where they have to fight the zombies for survival, the characters’ agency is severely limited. The zombies multiply rapidly and move at lightning speed. The outbreak cannot be stopped—the human characters are constantly running away and overwhelmed, not devising a plan to beat the zombies or change the world around them.

In the face of our own inevitable passing, sometimes the only agency we really have is how we choose to accept it.

This point is particularly illustrated in a well-done scene where the male characters band together to fight their way through carriages of zombies to get to their loved ones on the other side. Their success and agency lulls us into thinking we are witnessing the kind of badass moment more akin to a superhero movie—that is, until the most sympathetic character, Ma Dong-seok’s father-to-be, dies almost immediately afterwards. Then one by one, most of the main characters die, many choosing to sacrifice themselves so that others can live even a few minutes more. Indeed, it is only the villainous businessman who goes down kicking and screaming in his entitled belief that he should be exempt from death. Train to Busan is a reminder that, in the face of our own inevitable passing, sometimes the only agency we really have, despite our illusion of control, is how we choose to accept it.

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My mother died from cancer in 2020. We were by her side, in the hospital, as she passed away from us. Until the very last moment, into the final hours—we were still googling what else could be done to keep her breathing, what kind of oxygen equipment we could get our hands on. Despite what the doctors had told us, we believed we could still save her. All of this is to say that we could not accept that she was going to die. It is also to say how strong (understandably) the urge is to believe that you always have agency, how difficult it is to give up that illusion even at the very last minute, even when you are down on your knees.

I watched Train to Busan for the first time after my mother died, and it hit me in a way that was completely unexpected. It showed me there is the possibility of a certain kind of peace if we can accept death, in all its forms, whether it’s our own or that of our loved ones. The peace comes from knowing that death, and our struggle against it, is all part of the human experience—not an anomaly but at the very core of what it is to be alive. I never expected to be touched or get some kind of healing from a zombie movie that I had sought out as pure entertainment, as pure escapism. But that’s what makes it even more powerful.

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There is not only death, of course. There is also, constantly, life. The fact that the only two survivors in Train to Busan—a pregnant woman and a young girl—are physically the weakest out of everyone on the train and yet survive because of the sacrifice of others, is significant. Horror can be endured, and if we’re lucky, survived, largely due to others giving their life for us. The film hints that our own lives are also there to be given away for others. It alludes to the interconnectedness of each and everyone of us, rather than individual atoms able to survive alone. In the end if death is unavoidable, which it is, how we accept it or don’t, how we give ourselves to others or not, is perhaps the only real thing we have control over. This is what makes us different from zombies; it is what makes us human.

I never expected to get some kind of healing from a zombie movie that I had sought out as pure escapism.

The movie looks squarely at death, and the possibility of our dying, or watching our loved ones die—which is a horror in itself—and asks, how are we willing to die? And the flipside to this question, what is life for?

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An answer to this is perhaps intimated towards the end of the film, in the film’s only flashback scene. Seok-woo, while trying to save the pregnant woman, has just been bitten by the infected businessman Yon-suk. His own transformation now inevitable, Seok-woo says a heartbreaking goodbye to his daughter before moving to the back of the train to jump off it. Before he jumps though, as his eyes glaze over and he slowly turns into a zombie, we see his mind going back to the past, to when he holds his baby daughter for the first time. The camera zooms in on his face, which instead of a cliched look of sappy fatherly love, is one of stunned wonder and awe as he gazes down at his newborn; as well as a hint of uncertainty—in that moment he is astounded by new life, by the mystery he is holding in his hands.

Train To Busan is available on SBS On Demand.