Yeon Sang-ho is not interested in heroes here. His first victims are homeless people sleeping at the station, and the film's point is that nobody notices when they start dying. The outbreak spreads while police, medics and passers-by keep treating the poor as a nuisance.
The animation is rough and cheap-looking at times, with stiff faces and simple backgrounds. Strangely, that works for the zombies, whose jerky, broken movement looks wrong in a way that suits the genre. The action scenes in the subway tunnels and on the streets around the station are tense and well staged.
Shim Eun-kyung voices Hye-sun with real desperation, and Ryu Seung-ryong is unsettling as Suk-gyu. The story moves fast and never lets up, but the characters are harder to love than Train to Busan's, and the bleak politics sometimes drown the horror.
Critics loved it, giving it a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score, but audiences were much cooler. That split makes sense. This is a sharp, cruel social horror film, not a crowd-pleasing thrill ride.
