‘#Alive’ Trailer: ‘Burning’ Star Yoo Ah-in Fights to Survive During a Zombie Apocalypse

After starring in director Lee Chang-Dong’s international hit Burning in 2018, actor Yoo Ah-in starred in a Korean financial thriller called Default, but his next movie may well be another crossover success. He’s the star of a new genre thriller called #Alive, in which he plays a guy who finds himself seemingly trapped in a high rise during a zombie apocalypse. But he’s not alone: there’s a girl (Shin-Hye Park) living in a nearby building, and the two battle the frothing hordes to get to each other. Check out the first trailer below.

Alive Trailer

The Film Stage pointed us to this international trailer for #Alive, which marks the feature directorial debut of filmmaker Cho Il-hyung, who has producing credits on movies like I Saw the Devil, The Housemaid, and The Chaser. Pretty much any South Korean zombie movie in the next few years is still living in the shadow of Yeon Sang-ho’s excellent 2016 horror/thriller Train to Busan, which went on to become a massive international success story, but while #Alive seems like a smaller, scrappier, more contained movie, it seems like it also has the potential to break out in a big way.

The only thing potentially holding it back, as far as I can see, is whether or not international audiences will want to embrace stories which so clearly reflect our current pandemic moment right now. In the United States, we’re still living in quarantine, and every trip outside our front doors could is literally a matter of life and death. Will the usual appeal of hordes of mindless, diseased zombies hold true under our bizarre real-life circumstances? I suppose that could end up being a moot point, though: the film currently has distribution in its native South Korea (whose government has handled the coronavirus pandemic far better than ours has here), and it’s still searching for U.S. distribution. Still, with Train to Busan looming large in the international cinephile consciousness (and that movie’s forthcoming quasi-sequel on the way), I imagine it won’t be long before this one makes its way to our shores.

#Alive hits Korean theaters in June 2020.