Yeon Sang-ho’s return to zombie cinema after the phenomenon of Train to Busan (2016), and the largely forgotten (for good reason) sequel Peninsula (2020), Colony presents particular challenges for the filmmaker. This is, after all, a field thoroughly explored by artists of all kinds ever since George A. Romero released his living-dead classics, but in the case of the South Korean director — who hasn’t landed a major work since Busan — there is always the risk of making something that feels like little more than a retread of the peak of his career.

Let’s not lie: there are iterative moments and concepts in Colony. Before, we had protagonists trapped inside a train with the infected; now, a large commercial building — home to everything from shops and restaurants to conference halls and offices — serves as the battleground. Once again, there is a varied group of characters that includes people of all ages and, of course, a few melodramatic deaths meant to draw tears from the audience. On the other hand, Sang-ho seems creatively reinvigorated when it comes to imagining new behaviors and new dynamics for the film’s zombies, who here emerge from a virus created by Seo Young-cheol (Koo Kyo-hwan), a brilliant but unstable scientist who wants to unite humanity under a single purpose. Formerly employed by a biological research company that studies in fungi and animals the concept of information exchange through something like a shared mind, he takes advantage of an event organized by his former CEO to set this undertaking in motion.

Once the first person is infected, it doesn’t take long for the pathogen to spread. The zombies it creates are fast, but at first they can only move like four-legged animals and can’t distinguish humans from mannequins, for example. Then they all freeze in a pose like someone screaming in rage and, through an invisible network created by the microorganisms in their bodies, they undergo what a former colleague of Young-cheol describes as an “upgrade.” One of them learns something, and soon that knowledge spreads. The zombies stand upright, and their perception is enhanced. 

The group of survivors led by biology teacher Kwon Se-jeong (Gianna Jun), then, can hardly use the same trick twice to escape attacks that grow ever more organized by a horde that grows ever more intelligent. Watching this colony transform is the main engine of Sang-ho’s film, for which he shares screenplay credit with Choi Gyu-seok; despite its similarities to many other stories of this kind (The Last of Us will immediately come to mind in some situations), it finds unprecedented ways to work within the genre. We won’t go into details, but the twists that arise from the zombies’ evolution are not only genuinely unexpected, they also do a good job of making the protagonists’ situation riskier without losing any logical throughline.

That works because the director manages to establish a clear set of rules. Of course, much of the pleasure of watching Colony comes from seeing how he bends and challenges those rules, pushing both the audience and the characters out of their comfort zones without abandoning the film’s initial premises. 

And, overall, he succeeds. He cuts corners here and there, but he succeeds. From beginning to end, Colony maintains a propulsive rhythm, always driving its tension forward. That, on the other hand, creates emotional challenges that Sang-ho does not always seem fully equipped to meet. If zombies are often used as an analogy for something, here they represent a critique of the individualism and egocentrism that plague the human race. To emphasize that, the director pushes figures like Lee Jung-ok’s police officer or Ji Chang-wook’s security guard into taking actions that, while grounded in some personal motive, come across as conveniences meant to help Colony deliver its message.

Even so, the film’s success in repeatedly visualizing the infected’s changes and how they become incrementally more lethal retains enough force that any such stumble is quickly forgotten. Watching how Colony discovers new ideas, even if only aesthetic ones, within a kind of cinema in which so many films have already been made creates an irresistible sense of curiosity. 

Review written on May 16 at the Cannes Film Festival. Colony opens soon in Brazil.

Colony

Colony

2026

123 min

Country: Coreia do Sul

Duração: 123 min

Director(s): Yeon Sang-ho

Screenplay: Yeon Sang-ho, Choi Gyu-seok

Cast: Ji Chang-wook, Gianna Jun, Koo Kyo-hwan

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