On March 23, in the year of our pandemic clusterfuck, 9 of our 50 United States issued stay at home advisories for residents as their COVID-19 response: Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Illinois, Louisiana, California, Washington, and Oregon. Since then, most of the remaining states have followed suit. But because Americans can’t ever do what’s right or sensible, anti-quarantine and anti-mask movements have sprung up in defiance of logic, not to mention concern for the wellbeing of their neighbors, family, and friends.
Watching Americans make a bad situation catastrophic by selfishly fighting for their right to party and spread a dangerous illness at the same time, you can’t help feeling jealous of the characters in “Peninsula” cooperating with evacuation orders handed down by the government during a zombie holocaust. What would people here do if, say, Charlie Baker or Andrew Cuomo told their constituents that heading to the nearest port and boarding waiting ships was the only safe option to avoid being devoured by hordes of the living dead? “My body, my choice?” “That’s unconstitutional?” “Oh god, help, my best friend is eating my face?” Who knows? “Peninsula,” Yeon Sang-ho’s sequel to his inventive, anxiety-inducing zombie movie “Train to Busan,” imagines that in the best case scenario during the worst-case disaster, people do what they’re told and inflict only minor casualties on society. What a dream.
Those minor casualties are, of course, major tragedies for the people who suffer them, like Jung-seok (Gang Dong-won), an army man whose only thought as the picture opens is to save his older sister (Jang So-yeon), his brother-in-law Chul-min (Kim Do-yoon), and his nephew Dong-hwan (Moon Woo-jin) from the flood of zombies ravaging South Korea. He’s so focused that when the quartet drives a stranded family on the road, he leaves them behind to his sister’s shocked protests. Karmic justice is swift, and when they board a waiting military ship, an infected evacuee bites Dong-hwan, who in turn bites his mom, and in the ensuing carnage, only Jung-seok and Chul-min survive. Four years later, they’re scraping by in Hong Kong, where the locals chase them out of bars because they might be carrying the Korean virus.
Sound familiar? Try this: Hong Kong gangsters approach Jung-seok and Chul-min for a mission to Incheon, where they left a food truck loaded with a fortune in gold. It sounds like a cinch. Go in at night when the zombies are blind, make as little noise as possible, snatch the cash, profit. But thanks to rogue soldiers who’ve made Incheon their home, the scheme goes sideways, leaving Jung-seok and Chul-min trapped between deranged armed men plus an endless throng of reanimated corpses.
“Peninsula” picks up 4 years after “Train to Busan,” both in-story and in the world; the only association is the full title, being “Train to Busan Presents.” Yeon puts viewers in the aftermath and by happy accident, as with every other 2020 horror movie built on pandemic fixations, dovetails his tense genre thrillfest with real concerns about how we function under the conditions of an outbreak. Grant that “Peninsula” blends the tone of films like “Mad Max: Fury Road,” “Escape From New York,” and “Dawn of the Dead” (2004). It’s a carnival ride. But it’s a bloody, grimy, thoroughly exuberant carnival ride that also has a few good thoughts in its noggin about human behavior, arriving by coincidence at a moment when insight into human behavior feels like a necessary balm.
Jung-seok is riddled with guilt over his sister and nephew’s deaths, and over ignoring the bystanders met on the way to egress. Chul-min is sick with grief and resentment of Jung-seok. Ming-jung (Lee Jung-hyun) is determined to get her two daughters, Joon (Lee Re) and Yu-jin (Lee Ye-won), and her father (Kim Kyu-baek), out of Incheon, and oh, look at that: She’s the same woman Jung-seok left to die at the start of the film. The soldiers, for their part, are just big kids with guns, especially their unofficial leader, Sergeant Hwang (Kim Min-jae), who torments captured survivors by forcing them to flee from zombies set loose in a caged-in courtyard, or else be fed to them. Somehow, at some point, Hwang’s men stitched together a handful of zombies into a multi-limbed, writhing mass, too, which adds to the fun for anyone whose idea of “fun” is scampering away from hungry ghouls.
Yeon, who co-wrote “Peninsula” with Park Joon-suk, takes devilish glee in figuring out how to exaggerate the already exaggerated danger of zombie apocalypse while maintaining the film’s emotional throughlines. Like “Train to Busan,” feeling is vital to “Peninsula”: The stakes are both so broad and so micro-focused that when anyone dies, the death means something, even in the zombie chow pit, because horror lets audiences see the worst in themselves, and there’s little worse than feeding hapless schmoes to the undead. But Yeon’s exaggerations extend to action, too. Joon, having spent a chunk of her developing life fending off zombies, drives like she’s in a “Fast and Furious” film, drifting through mobs of monsters with a preternatural calm that reads as boredom. For most, speeding through zombie-infested urban environments would be a nightmare. For Joon, it’s Tuesday.
Watching “Peninsula” means watching a horror franchise grow organically in real-time. The film’s layers—high-tension horror, black humor, potent melodrama—make a superb follow-up to an otherwise closed circuit; “Train to Busan” didn’t need a second chapter, but Yeon has written that chapter so well and with such confidence that he should really consider a third. The protagonists in that movie got their send-off. The protagonists in “Peninsula” get theirs, too. But the threat COVID-19 presents to global stability yields enough material for a third entry in the series and beyond. If “Peninsula” is what Yeon can imagine under better circumstances, what can he dream up now that we know just how self-centered people are when the whole world’s falling apart around them? [B+]
“Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula” is in select theaters now.
