Movies about hijacked planes or runaway trains are nothing new. The concept of a speeding vehicle wired with a bomb that detonates if it slows down immediately brings to mind Speed (1994) or the original Japanese thriller The Bullet Train (1975). Bullet Train Explosion (2025) is no exception to this familiar template. Yet, director Shinji Higuchi makes an effort to ground the story in realism, crafting a tense, drill-like simulation—with logical possibilities that could only happen, well, in movies.

The film follows the East Japan Railway Company’s bullet train, Hayabusa 60, as it speeds from Shin-Aomori to Tokyo. Somewhere along the four-to-five-hour journey, a bomb is secretly planted onboard without the crew’s knowledge. If the train’s speed drops below 100 km/h, the bomb will detonate. The perpetrator demands a ransom of 100 billion yen. How the bomb is handled—and how the people aboard a train running over 260 km/h survive...