Fantasia Fest Roundup Day 3: Before I Wake & Train to Busan

This week, ComingSoon.net has made the trek to Montreal, Quebec for the 20th anniversary edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival, the largest genre festival in North America. We’re at the tail end of the festivities, which concludes today, but we are going to run capsule reviews of some of the things we have seen and people we have talked to.

Today we’re finally getting into some straight-up horror flicks, although both films have dysfunctional family dynamics at the center of their plots: Mike Flanagan‘s supernatural fable Before I Wake and the balls-to-the-wall Korean zombies-on-a-train epic Train to Busan.

Before I Wake

With 2013’s Oculus director Mike Flanagan showed that he could make an emotional horror movie with teeth, not to mention brains to spare. With his new genre entry Before I Wake (originally titled “Somnia” before the distributer changed it against his wishes) he leans more on the heart than the head, crafting a “kid with powers” fable that’s light on both fright and an adequate sense of resolution.

The film introduces its child protagonist Cody (Room‘s Jacob Tremblay) as an almost abhorrently sweet boy whose supposed sleep disorder hides a deeper secret: He can manifest his dreams into reality. Cody’s new, well-off foster parents — played by Kate Bosworth (Superman Returns, 21) and Thomas Jane (The Mist, The Punisher) — discover his abilities almost immediately as he manifests a physical projection of their dead son. Also butterflies for some reason.

Instead of reporting it or taking this kid to be hooked up to electrodes and studied by science, Bosworth’s character Jessie becomes addicted to the illusions he can project, somehow emotionally shattered (or dense) enough to believe her deceased boy is being resurrected as opposed to merely projected via Cody. Jane’s Mark senses the home video nature of their dead child’s nightly appearances, and reframes Jessie’s attempts to coax more visions out of Cody as a form of abuse.

Things escalate further when the dark side of Cody’s dreams — a.k.a. his nightmares — also start to manifest, specifically a Guillermo del Toro-esque monster nicknamed “The Kanker Man.” See, this terrifying bald figure with glowing eyes can hurt and devour people, which he does, and as the disappearances begin Jessie learns it’s not only custody of Cody that’s at stake but her and her husband’s very lives.

Before I Wake was always intended to have more of a fable quality, going much more the Sixth Sense route towards emotional catharsis than The Ring-esque terror. Flanagan also had good reason not to go down the road of the “why” or “how” of Cody’s powers.

“That scene was in the script,” Flanagan told us in an interview. “There was a whole sequence early in the movie when they were calling Annabeth Gish [the social worker] together trying to figure out as much as they could without sounding crazy to her. What we found with the scene was it felt like asking the audience to spend time watching the characters catching up to where the audience was when they walked in. It was not time well spent. The audience has already accepted this premise. There’s something too about a fairy tale, no one ever stops to explain how someone built a candy house. When you get into a real fairy tale these things just ‘are.'”

While what Flanagan says is true about avoiding the tendency to over-explain, it is to the Jane and Bosworth character’s detriment that they occasionally seem a little too nonchalant in the face of an extraordinary supernatural phenomenon. It makes it harder to believe in these characters, and consequently we’re not that invested in whether or not they have a fairy tale ending.

Still, Flanagan executes some memorable jump scares and the whole cast is bringing their A-game, particularly Bosworth. While Before I Wake is not a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, it feels like a slight work of a promising director, an amusing B-side.

Be sure to check back for more of our exclusive interview with Mike Flanagan!

Before I Wake opens in theaters everywhere on September 9.

Train to Busan

One of the most unexpected triumphs of this year’s Fantasia Fest was the North American premiere of the South Korean zombies-on-a-train epic Train to Busan. You might even be thinking to yourself, “Zombie movies are DONE! The market is saturated with ’em!” Wrong. This is the type of movie that not only justifies the walking dead genre, but moviegoing as a whole. Its not surprising that it’s currently chomping its way through Korea’s box office records, with multiple studios reportedly dying to get their hands on the remake rights, including Hollywood’s 20th Century Fox and Sony Pictures along with France’s Gaumont, Canal Plus and EuropaCorp.

The setup could not be more simple: A douchey business dude father (Gong Yoo) decides to take a half-day off work to bring his neglected 7-year-old daughter (Kim Su-an) on a train trip to see her mother/his ex-wife. Unfortunately he does this right at the tippy-top of a zombie epidemic spreading throughout the country, with one of the unfortunate infected parties boarding their train just before it leaves the station. People get bit, they bite other people, and so on and so on…

If that plot sounds par-for-the-course let me assure you that the execution is anything but standard. Former animation director Yeon Sang-ho (Seoul Station) makes his live-action debut sing based on pure character building and outlandishly suspenseful set pieces, including the interesting idea that zombies can’t see in the dark. He also utilizes the sh*t out of his bullet train setting, with passengers hiding from zombies in bathrooms or evading them by crawling on luggage racks.

The folks fighting off the growing horde of bite-crazy undead include a pair of old ladies, a college baseball player, a grungy homeless man and The Good The Bad and The Weird‘s Ma Dong-seok as the train’s badass-in-residence, who uses his mighty punching skills to protect his pregnant wife and pretty much everyone else. Gong Yoo’s character has the “selfish-to-selfless” arc where he finally nuts up and learns to protect his daughter, while Kim Eui-sung plays the ultimate selfish corporate tool who’s only interested in protecting himself. He’s the real baddie of the piece, not the zombies. Okay, also the zombies.

As for the zombies, they are of the World War Z fast/build-o stack-o variety, evidenced in a scene where literally a hundred zombies link themselves into one superunit to latch onto the back of a moving train car. Like the bullet train itself, their speed is crucial to the propulsive nature of the story, and feels like a relief after six trudging, monotonous years of “The Walking Dead.”

Ultimately, even if you are at the end of your rope with the genre, zombie fans owe it to themselves to check out Train to Busan, if only so you can shout at the top of your lungs when it’s over, “Now THAT’S how it’s done!”