Peninsula (2020)

Some sequels disappoint you. Peninsula doesn't disappoint so much as baffle. How do you take one of the best horror films of the last decade, a film that had me genuinely gripping the armrest, and return to that same world four years later with something this hollow, this loud, this utterly devoid of anything that made the original work? I watched it hoping for more of what I loved about Train to Busan and got something closer to a bad video game cutscene running for two hours with no option to skip.

The setup is fine on paper, actually. A former soldier returns to a quarantined, zombie-ravaged Korean peninsula on a cash retrieval mission. There's potential in that premise. A lean, desperate survivalist thriller in a collapsed society could have been something special. Instead, what we get is a bloated, tonally confused spectacle that can't decide whether it wants to be a breakneck action film or a heartfelt family drama, so it lurches between the two and earns neither.

The car chases are the most talked-about set pieces, and I understand why they were sold as selling points. Wasteland drifts, flip stunts, slow-motion explosions. On paper, kinetic and exciting. On screen, absolutely drowning in CGI so fake-looking it puts you at a distance from every single moment. There's no weight to anything. No danger. It reminded me of someone who'd heard of Mad Max but never actually sat down and watched it, someone who'd just read a plot summary and figured the vibe was "cars go fast and things explode." Mad Max works because you feel the grit and the threat under your fingernails. Peninsula feels like a screensaver.

The zombies, once the terrifying centrepiece of everything the original built its tension around, are barely a presence here. They've been demoted to background furniture. The real antagonists are a cult-like militia: tribal-painted, riddle-speaking, driving souped-up hatchbacks like the world's least frightening post-apocalyptic gang. I'm not sure if we're meant to find them menacing or absurd. The film seems equally unsure.

And then there are the dramatic scenes. Long, drawn-out emotional exchanges that go on and on, reaching for the kind of gut-punch feeling that made the original so affecting, and coming up completely empty every time. The screenplay hasn't done the groundwork. You can't shortcut your way to genuine emotion by just staging it at length. The heart that made Train to Busan so devastating isn't something you can just slot back in. It was earned, carefully, across every scene. Here it's assumed, and the assumption is wrong.

Gang Dong-won is a perfectly capable actor being asked to carry a film that gives him almost nothing to work with. His character exists as a function of plot mechanics rather than as a person. The same goes for nearly everyone else on screen. When you don't care whether anyone lives or dies, a zombie film has a serious problem on its hands.

A soulless, noisy, poorly written disaster. Not scary, not exciting, not moving. One and a half stars, and I'm being generous because the premise at least showed a flicker of ambition before the film immediately squandered it. Do yourself a favour: if you haven't seen the original, go and watch Train to Busan tonight. And if you have seen it and you're tempted by this sequel out of affection for that film, please know that affection is not returned. Peninsula doesn't deserve the goodwill it's trading on.

Rating: ★½  | Year: 2020  | Watched: 2025-10-27

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More from South Korea: Memories of Murder (2003) · Lost in Starlight (2025) · The Handmaiden (2016) · Yellow Colt (2014)
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More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)
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