Seoul Station (2016)

Here's the thing about Train to Busan: it's brilliant. Genuinely, properly brilliant. Tense, emotional, propulsive, with a real human heart beating underneath all the carnage. So when I found out there was an animated prequel set in the same world, I was curious. Cautiously optimistic, even. Then I watched Seoul Station, and... yeah. It's fine. It's fine in the way that a slightly flat pint is fine. You drink it, you move on, you don't think about it much afterwards.

Seoul Station takes place in the hours before the outbreak that drives Train to Busan, centring on the city's homeless population around the titular station as the zombie apocalypse begins to take hold. On paper, that's a genuinely interesting angle. Grounding a horror story among people society has already abandoned, people who are already invisible, already written off, has real potential for something sharp and meaningful. And occasionally you can feel that potential flickering. There are ideas here about class, about neglect, about who gets to survive and who gets left behind. The film is clearly trying to say something.

The trouble is it doesn't say it particularly well. The pacing drags in places it really shouldn't, especially in a film that clocks in at under ninety minutes. The animation style is serviceable but rarely more than that. It doesn't have the visual flair or the emotional specificity you'd want from something telling a story this bleak. The characters feel thin compared to the people you meet on that train, and that thinness makes it hard to feel the stakes the way you should.

What really strikes me, sitting with it now, is the strange position Seoul Station occupies. Train to Busan sits at the centre of its own little universe, and the films on either side of it, this prequel and Peninsula, the sequel that came a few years later, both feel like pale shadows by comparison. Peninsula has its own problems, but the sandwich analogy feels right: you've got this extraordinary filling and then two slices of slightly stale bread on either side. Neither ruins the meal. Neither adds much to it either.

I don't want to be too harsh on Seoul Station, because it isn't a bad film. It's watchable. Some of the horror imagery works, and the grimness of the setting has a certain raw quality to it. But when you're a prequel to something as well-crafted as Train to Busan, "watchable" isn't really good enough. You need to justify your existence a bit more than that. You need to make the viewer feel that seeing this story adds something to the experience of the main film, deepens it somehow. Seoul Station doesn't quite manage that.

If you're a fan of Train to Busan and you're wondering whether to track this one down, I'd say go in with tempered expectations. It's worth a watch if you're invested in the world. Just don't expect it to come anywhere close to matching what made that film special. Three stars, and I'm being generous because the central idea deserved better execution than it got here.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2016  | Watched: 2025-07-15

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Yeon Sang-ho: Peninsula (2020) · Train to Busan (2016)
More from South Korea: Memories of Murder (2003) · Peninsula (2020) · Lost in Starlight (2025) · The Handmaiden (2016)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More animation: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)