Colony is in theaters on August 28.
When Train to Busan — Yeon Sang-ho’s taut KTX-set thriller about a girl dad’s (Gong Yoo) desperate quest to keep his daughter (Kim Su-an) safe in a burgeoning zombie apocalypse — was released in 2016, it became one of the first South Korean films to break through to a global mainstream audience. A decade later, the statuses of both the zombie genre and Korean pop culture in the West have evolved.
General audiences have mostly moved on from the zombie craze of the 2000s and 2010s, a diminishing interest no doubt partially fueled by oversaturation as well as by a global pandemic that made virus-related stories way less fun to watch. And Korean media is no longer niche in the U.S.; the East Asian country is currently producing some of the most popular stories in the world. 2022’s All of Us Are Dead, a zombie outbreak series set in a Korean high school, became one of Netflix’s most-watched series ever, proving that there’s still a hunger for zombie stories that hit on societal anxiety with brutal precision. Unfortunately, Colony does not.
It must be annoying for Yeon, whose explorations of society-level psychological horror have evolved in projects like Hellbound (2021-2024) and Revelations (2025), to constantly have critics and audiences compare his every project — often unfavorably — to that breakout film. But that’s the curse one must bear when you make a modern horror classic, and when it comes to Colony — which, unlike animated prequel short Seoul Station (2016) and live-action sequel Peninsula (2020), is his first original zombie tale in a decade — it feels particularly inevitable.
Nearly 60 years into the modern zombie movie, it’s difficult to do anything original. Colony finds its glimpses of originality in the construction of its zombie virus… which isn’t a virus at all, but rather a mold-based biotech weapon designed to eliminate those messy barriers between humans. In the mind of disgruntled and incredibly ambitious scientist Seo Young-cheol (gleefully played by Koo Kyo-hwan), miscommunication is the source of human suffering. His solution? To create a slime mold that binds us all together as one hivemind-like consciousness.
Seo unleashes the virus at a conference for his former company, Chains Bio, by injecting the slime mold directly into the veins of Kang Woo-chul, the CEO who fired Seo for his maniacal interests but kept using his research to bulk up his bottom line. From there, the virus quickly spreads across the multi-building, high-rise department store where the biotech presentation is taking place. With the squish of a slobbery body tackle, shoppers quickly turn from mundane consumers to parts of a larger, mycelial-like organism that can learn from the experiences of every individual member.
The infected are not undead, but they are still rabid — acrobatic, zombie-like parts of a whole that is deeply invested in expanding its membership, like Star Trek’s Borg crossed with an unhinged Cirque Du Soleil troupe. Like a colony of bees, they take instruction from Young-cheol, who tells authorities that he has infected himself with the only vaccine for the spreading virus. It’s one of Colony’s most original and intriguing ideas — a concept poised for commentary on the rise of AI, our increasingly algorithm-driven pop culture, or a more specific juxtaposition of collective vs. individualistic cultures. But the script, co-written by Yeon and Choi Gyu-seok, doesn’t deliver; rather, we’re left with an inconsistent exploration of how the hivemind processes information and emotion that muddles any potential societal insight.
The Colony script is similarly superficial and inconsistent when it comes to character exploration and dynamics, a weakness partially saved by the film’s all-star cast. Jun Ji-hyun (aka Gianna Jun of My Love From the Star fame) channels ’90s action stars as Kwon Se-jeong, a no-nonsense biotechnology professor who uses her brains and focus to try to save a ragtag group of survivors, including a trifecta of teens embroiled in a bullying plot, a retired track coach, and Se-jeong’s own ex-husband. Her most helpful allies come in the form of Ji Chang-wook’s Choi Hyun-seok, a highly competent mall security guard, and Kim Shin-rok as Choi Hyun-hee, a tech-savvy wheelchair user who is also Hyun-seok’s big sister. The brother-sister dynamic represents one of the few sustained emotional throughlines of the film.
One of Colony’s many missed opportunities when it comes to a deeper character dynamic comes in the form of Se-jeong’s relationship with her ex-husband’s current wife, Gong Seol-hee (Shin Hyun-been). Also a biotechnologist, Seol-hee is investigating the source of Young-cheol’s bioterrorist attack from the outside. The respectful dynamic subverts the usual stereotypical anonymosity seen between successive partners of the same person, but is only leaned upon occasionally, robbing their eventual team up of emotional complexity.
Where the script disappoints, Yeon’s direction delivers. Fast-paced, high-stakes action scenes maintain cohesiveness and help make the horror more anxiety-inducing. In one of the film’s early action sequences, the retired track coach character jumps, dodges, and crawls around both zombies and store endcaps in an attempt to snag some perfume that Se-jeong has identified as a possible weapon against the infected. In another, Seol-hee tries to make it out of a makeshift laboratory filled with rabid, infected monkeys in a complex, frantic scene that would slot right into a Planet of the Apes reboot film. Another one of Colony’s strengths comes in the physicality of its zombie performers, who contort their bodies into inhuman poses and collective formations. The agility of the performances, and the creativity of the choreography, imbues the infected with an alien element, increasing the creep factor as these humans act in decidedly inhuman ways.
Yeon is a director who cares about the future of cinema. He made his previous film, The Ugly, on a super-small budget, seemingly in part to experiment with ways Korean cinema might be able to survive in a time when people are going to the theaters less often and big tech streamers like Netflix have access to outsized, hard-to-compete-with budgets. For all its failures of potential, Colony is the kind of middling movie that makes for a fun low-stakes afternoon at the cinema. The premise, which is basically Die Hard with zombies, is classic; the performances are charismatic; and the direction, like the film’s protagonist, gets the job done. This is no Train to Busan… but few movies are.
feedzy_import_tag
About the Author
