 "A still from Train To Busan")
In terms of the world order, the last couple of weeks have been unreal to say the least. Looking at the way Donald Trump is cramming in white supremacists in his cabinet, can cinema or any other art form live up to the potential dystopia that the Rust Belt states have wrought upon rest of the world?
But then, I get reminded of Nietzsche who said “we have art in order not to die of the truth.” I found two thrillers to find succour in while Trump is busy assembling his depression-inducing Cabinet full of people who are racist, homophobic and Islamophobic. Babak Anvari’s Under The Shadow is a supremely scary movie set in the 1980s when the Iran-Iraq war was at its raging best, and Tehran in the eye of the storm. Narges Rashidi excels in the role of a mother who has to stave off the demons experienced by her daughter while her doctor husband is away.
Anvari infuses the proceedings with lovely tongue-in-cheek cultural references of the eighties’ Iran, including a delightful scene where Rashidi’s character works out to a Jane Fonda aerobic VHS tape.
Anvari’s sense of space and cinematographer Kit Fraser’s use of natural lighting makes the audience like a fly on the wall whenever Rashidi and her daughter scramble to their apartment’s basement whenever a missile is shot at Tehran. The movie’s most indelible moment is when a massive missile gets stuck in the apartment’s roof. That was definitely my standout moment from all the movies I watched at the recent Mumbai film festival.
The climax felt like a cop out but that’s a minor quibble of this otherwise largely enjoyable movie. It’s heart-warming to see that Iranian cinema is going beyond its “humanist” cinema and exploring darker themes, with A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night setting the benchmark. In the last couple of years, there have been quite a few horror movies with single mothers dealing with monsters, like Babadook, Conjuring 2, Goodnight Mommy and Lights Out. Under The Shadow takes this pattern ahead.
Anvari’s slow burning, atmospheric script takes all the tropes of a typical horror movie and melds them into something original, fresh, vivid and intense.
A still from Train To Busan
Speaking of single parents, Korean thriller Train To Busan is about a divorced father taking his daughter to his ex-wife from Seoul to Busan in a bullet train only to find out that a zombie invasion threatens to exterminate everyone in the train. If seen in the backdrop of the Trump win, Yeon Sang-Ho’s splendidly blood-drenched script spirals out from a typical Korean slasher movie into a metafictional, quasi-apocalyptic glorious hot mess in no time.
The premise is simple: nuclear leak at a plant turns people into zombies with a newfound taste for human blood and one man wages a battle against them to protect his daughter. Gong Yoo as the mercenary fund manager who never thinks beyond himself and later has a change of heart is quite good. The movie does evoke comparisons with Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer, what with the similarity of the protagonists making their way past through several train coaches but Yeon’s script is more grounded and pulpy. The movie almost feels like an alternative Tarantino movie with blood spilling all over and audience’s basest instincts being indulged.
It’s great to see the movie that broke multiple box office records in Korean get a theatrical release in India. Watching those zombies getting slayed during most of the two-hour duration while I was chomping on gourmet popcorn is probably one of my best guilty pleasures of the year. The action sequences are really well executed and exude the vibes of any big budgeted Hollywood movies. My personal favourite is the one in Daejeon when an army of zombie soldiers start baying for the blood of the train passengers trying to find a safe way out.
The movie’s other acting revelation is Ma Dong-seok as a soon-to-be father who boards the train along with his pregnant wife. The fight sequence where a motley bunch of living passengers led by Ma’s character cross a few zombie-filled coaches to join other alive passengers is ingenious and might just inspire those Hollywood producers sign up Jason Statham for a remake. A ripping good watch, this.
