“Tunnel”

Unrated (2:07)

***

Opens today at Pearlridge West

Mainstream South Korean cinema contributed the summer’s best action film with “Train to Busan,” a kinetic kick of a zombie thriller that brought new life to the form. “Tunnel,” also a huge hit in South Korea, doesn’t quite do the same for the disaster genre, but it’s a well-made, suspenseful and surprisingly moving twist on a formula everyone knows all too well.

Like “Busan,” “Tunnel” focuses on a busy, white-collar dad who suddenly finds himself locked in a life-or-death struggle. Jung-soo (Ha Jung-Woo) is a Kia car salesman driving home with nothing but a couple of bottles of water and his daughter’s birthday cake in the backseat to keep him company.

He doesn’t know it yet, but all will come in handy when the walls of a recently constructed tunnel through a mountainside begin to collapse around him. Seemingly trapped in his car with a phone at 78 percent, he manages to let authorities know his situation — but they may not be able to save him in time. Meanwhile, he communicates with his distressed wife, Se-hyun (Doona Bae, from “Cloud Atlas” and “Sense8”), and even TV journalists who get his number.

Written and directed with a palpable sense of urgency by Kim Seong-hun (who made the well-regarded thriller “A Hard Day”), “Tunnel” is not just a story of one trapped man’s attempted survival like “127 Hours.” While the tunnel-collapse scenes are frighteningly well-staged and Jung-soo’s isolation feels real, the film is also a knock on political showboating, shoddy workmanship, bureaucratic bumbling, and the media (Jung-soo becomes something of a media sensation like the Chilean miners did during their 69-day ordeal in 2010.)

While Seong-hun’s attempts to strum heartstrings gets the best of him — did there really need to be a puppy thrown into the mix? — there are other times when the emotionalism works. Jung-soo’s increasingly desperate conversations with his wife, his grim realization that he may not make it, and Se-hyun being made to feel guilty over the death of a rescuer trying to save her husband give viewers more to hang on to than cool visuals.

Seong-hun remembers that the best special effects are no substitute for people you care about. If only all disaster films could take that to heart.