Depicting courage in "Train to Busan" (2016) and "Irena's Vow" (2023)

What would you do?

This week I watched two totally different films that, I think, ended up being about more or less the same thing: courage. The first film was a Korean zombie film titled Train to Busan starring my favorite South Korean actor Gong Yoo, and the second film was Irena’s Vow, a WWII film about a Polish Catholic girl who saves the lives of 12 Jews. Like I said— two totally different films— except they weren’t. They both seemed to tackle the age-old, and currently relevant, question: What would you do?

Cowardice or common sense?

The main guy in Train to Busan is a recently divorced fund manager, Seok-woo, who is traveling to Busan with his young daughter Soo-An. When her father sees his daughter give up her seat, he takes aside for a life lesson: “Why did you do that? At a time like this, you have to only think of yourself,” he tells his little girl. The little girl listens, but knows better. “You only think of yourself, daddy. This is why mommy left you,” she says sadly, clearly suffering from the divorce. But was he wrong?

In Irene’s Vow, there is a very similar scene at the beginning of the film when Irena starts working as a kitchen assistant for Nazi officials. There, she befriends an older server who who tells her: “Do you know who survives this kind of change in destiny? You look down. You look neither to the left nor to the right, nor up, nor even straight ahead. You look at your own two feet taking one step at a time… You worry about you. You take care of you… Hear nothing, see nothing, speak nothing!”. Was he a coward?

Courage or stupidity?
I couldn’t help but see the similarities between the two fatherly figures in the two seemingly different films. When it comes to survival, it’s every man or woman for themselves and, the thing is, it’s completely understandable. Why wouldn’t you look out for yourself and your own when threatened with a cruel and painful death? (Whether by hungry zombies or blood thirsty Nazis.) Anything else would be stupid. Nonsense. Unnatural.

To juxtapose Seuk-woo is another character named Sang-hwa who boards the train with his pregnant wife. In the film, Sang-hwa risks everything for the safety of other passengers despite his pregnant wife. Given the fact that his wife was pregnant, wouldn’t it have made more sense to look out only for himself and his family for the sake of his unborn child? Sure it would, but he’s more like Irena in Irena’s Vow in that he does the brave stupid thing even at the risk of getting devoured alive.

“Look at where it got you.”

In yet another scene in Train to Busan, a not yet-zombie-infected woman looks at her rabid sister through the glass in between them. “You were always helping others instead of yourself, look at where it got you,” she says sorrowfully. The film thus confronts me with an uncomfortable question: What would be the point of saving lives who may never say thank you, or worse, hang you out to dry? Where is the line between stupid and courageous or, more chillingly, common sense and cowardice?

I don’t actually know the answer. I’m not even sure these are the right questions. What I do know is that as I scroll through harrowing images of maimed men, women, children, and babies in Rafah, I wonder who I would be if such evil were happening here. Would I shut the door on their faces due to cowardice and call it common sense? Or would I do the courageous thing and let people spit on me and call me stupid? I don’t know. On a lighter note, great little films. Do watch them.