Train to Busan returns in 4K as Madrid’s Korean Film Festival hunts the monster next door

The scariest shot in Train to Busan is not a zombie. It is a closed door. Halfway through Yeon Sang-ho’s film, survivors who fight their way down the train reach the healthy passengers, who refuse to let them in. In one cut the film turns its monster inside out: the threat is the man in the next seat. That idea, horror close enough to touch, is the spine of this year’s Korean Film Festival in Spain, its eighteenth edition, titled El Monstruo de al Lado, “The Monster Next Door”.

The programme, organised in Madrid by the Korean Cultural Centre in Spain, the cultural arm of the Embassy of the Republic of Korea, is short and deliberate. Five features across suspense, action and science fiction, plus the three winners of the centre’s fourth short-film competition. Train to Busan anchors it, back on a big screen in a restored ultra-high-definition presentation for its tenth anniversary. It premiered as a Cannes midnight screening and became the template for a decade of Korean genre exports.

Beside it sits the film that taught the world to watch Korean thrillers in the first place. Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, with Choi Min-sik as a man locked in a room for fifteen years without explanation, won the Grand Prix at Cannes and still runs on the cruellest withheld reveal in the genre. Its monster is not next door. It is already inside the family.

Choi Min-sik and Kang Hye-jung in Oldboy by Park Chan-wook — Image: Show East

Sleep carries the threat into the bedroom. Jason Yu’s debut, selected for Critics’ Week at Cannes, follows a young couple, played by Jung Yu-mi and the late Lee Sun-kyun, as the husband’s sleepwalking becomes a danger neither of them can control. Jung Yu-mi is also one of the survivors in Train to Busan, which makes her the festival’s quiet through-line: twice cast as the woman who must decide whether to trust the body beside her.

The two newest titles pull the theme in opposite directions. HOPE, from The Wailing director Na Hong-jin, is the programme’s big-scale bet: a science-fiction creature film led by Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung and Jung Ho-yeon, with Alicia Vikander in the international cast. The Journey to Gyeong-ju goes small and sour. Kim Mi-jo, whose indie drama Gull won the top prize at Jeonju, directs a black-comedy revenge road trip about a mother and her daughters who set out after the man responsible for the youngest daughter’s death once he walks out of prison. Lee Jung-eun, Gong Hyo-jin and Park So-dam lead.

Hwang Jung-min firing at a creature in Na Hong-jin film HOPE — Image: Plus M Entertainment

The festival runs from 8 to 10 October in Sala 3 of the Palacio de la Prensa, on Madrid’s Plaza del Callao. The Journey to Gyeong-ju opens on Thursday the 8th. Friday the 9th pairs Train to Busan in 4K with HOPE. Saturday the 10th closes with Oldboy and Sleep. A winning short plays before each day’s last feature. Every film screens in Korean with Spanish subtitles and admission is free until the room is full, first come, first served; the first 100 people at each session get mini popcorn and Korean tteok.

Five films, one argument. Korean genre cinema has spent two decades insisting that the monster does not arrive from outside. It is already in the carriage, the bedroom, the house across the road. Madrid gets three nights to check who is sitting next to it.

Tags: Park Chan-wook, film festivals, Yeon Sang-ho, Na Hong-jin, Train to Busan, Oldboy, Korean films