Busanhaeng (2016)

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Seo Seok-woo	Gong Yoo	½
Seo Su-an	Kim Su-an	½
Yoon Sang-hwa	Ma Dong-seok
Seong-kyeong	Jung Yu-mi
Min Young-guk	Choi Woo-shik
Kim Jin-hee	Ahn So-hee	½
Yon-suk	Kim Eui-sung
Homeless man	Choi Gwi-hwa	-

Review

With its serious dramatic approach and scientific accuracy (within its realm), this South Korean genre-crossover was able to revitalize the zombie apocalypse sub-genre and find wide-reaching success outside of Korea's borders. Gong Yoo plays a fund manager and non-attentive father who must travel to Busan with his daughter Kim Su-an in order for the girl to spend time with her mother on her birthday. As they board the train, it becomes clear that the so-called riots that have been reported from the streets of Seoul are actually a lot more serious than that, and Gong Yoo must navigate an increasingly more dire situation aboard the train while reconnecting with his daughter.

Much like I Am Legend, Busanhaeng manages to transcend the often quite confining zombie sub-genre by treating it like something unknown and unprecedented. Our protagonists don't recognize that they're in a zombie movie (why would they?), making their situation more absorbing and tangible for us. We relate to their feeling of not knowing what to do. And the human drama unfolding borrows cleverly from some of history's better disaster movies. Busanhaeng became the sixth highest grossing film of all time in South Korea. Lead actor Gong Yoo later went on to star in the TV-series "Squid Game".