GHOST TRAIN Review: South Korean Horror Trods Overly Familiar Supernatural Ground

The translated title of Tak Se-woong’s (Devil in the Lake, A Stranger Dream) latest film, Ghost Train (괴기열차), is something of a misnomer.

 

While Tak’s supernatural horror film certainly involves ghosts (a handful, maybe more) and trains (many state-of-the-art South Korean trains, but only one actually involving ghosts), it’s primarily set in and around a supposedly haunted train station where, if internet and TV reports bear any truth, frequent disappearances and the occasional suicide have become the norm. 

 

Incongruous title aside, Ghost Train revolves around Da-kyeong (Joo Hyun-young), a self-described “horror queen” and YouTube content creator with an insatiable hunger for clicks, clout, and, of course, fame. (Insert cautionary tale callout here.) She thinks nothing of slipping past security barriers, entering the station master’s (Jeon Bae-soo) singularly isolated, isolating domain, and plying him with overpriced liquor, all the better to loosen his tongue and acquire the ready-made ghost stories that will hopefully catapult her dying channel into million-follower territory and beyond. 

 

It does, eventually, but Ghost Train temporarily sets aside Da-kyeong's neon-blinking cautionary tale — the comeuppance for her clout-chasing sins, if it comes at all, doesn’t arrive until Ghost Train’s final, irony-tinged moments — for a handful of anthology-style segments narrated by the wan, unnamed station master. First comes a tale of a college dropout and insomniac with a bad temper, an all-too-familiar woman with long black hair and an uncontrollable compulsion involving her head and any available glass surface. 

 

Escape from the black-haired wraith proves impossible, of course, though the cautionary elements appear to be murkier: Maybe something about honesty (the soon-to-exit character lies to his mother), rudeness (treat convenience store cashiers with respect), and helping those in obvious need (the black-haired woman). Whatever the “sin” or “crime,” the result won’t come as a surprise to anyone conversant with the horror anthology format. 

 

The second of four embedded segments concerns a teenage girl who is overly obsessed with her appearance and a bandaged woman who has turned into the girl's worst nightmare, an unrelenting stalker. Carrying an open mug filled with acid, the bandaged woman creepily comments on the young girl’s “pretty” (Western) nose. Envy, the girl’s for seemingly impossible Western-inspired standards of beauty, and the bandaged woman’s, collide in one of the train station’s desolate bathrooms.

 

The third segment gives a station-dwelling homeless man a brief respite from the grim reality of his impoverished existence before reminding him — and the audience on the other side of the screen — that there’s always an existential or metaphysical price to pay for that respite, especially where paranormal forces like the ones plaguing the train station come into play. The fourth segment circles back to the critique of impossible beauty standards and their consequently corrosive effects, but this time through the point-of-view of a vain, self-centered "beauty queen" Hye-jin (Kim Ji-in), Da-kyeong’s chief YouTube rival. She's also a direct threat to Da-kyeong’s burgeoning relationship with another classmate, Woo-jin (Choi Bo-min). 

 

Ultimately, Ghost Train returns a newly empowered Da-kyeong and her story to the foreground. The once patient, now impatient, station master wrests control of the overarching story, sharing why and how the train station became haunted by the supernatural. (Note: It’s an unoriginal, derivative idea and thus, incredibly disappointing.) For the naive Da-kyeong, it’s only a matter of time before she becomes part of the supernatural stories she's exploited for fame, celebrity, and popularity. 

 

Competently, if anonymously directed by Tak from Jo Ba-Reun’s (Ghost Mansion, Vibration, The Hole) slightly undernourished screenplay, Ghost Train all too frequently telegraphs its best scares, relying on tried-and-true tropes, long before the onscreen characters experience them directly or the offscreen audience experiences them indirectly. The train station’s atmosphere, sometimes well-lit, sometimes not, filled with labyrinthine corridors, almost makes up for the lack of scares, but almost isn’t enough, especially when a genre film like Ghost Train promises horror fans so much and eventually delivers so little.