Colony Review: The Next Evolution of the Zombie Film

South Korean director Yeon Sang-ho doesn’t just make zombie films, but they’re the part of his filmography that has made the biggest international impact. His debut feature, Train to Busan, and its animated prequel, Seoul Station, and live-action sequel, Peninsula, established his reputation as a horror director. Now he’s returned to the genre with Colony, another zombie film but this time one detached from the Busan continuity.

Of course, the term “zombie” has become a big tent for any human menace, dead or not, whose brain has become rage-fueled goop. Where George A. Romero became increasingly fascinated by the remnants of their humanity, and the 28 Days Later franchise has become increasingly focused on their emotional well-being, Colony is more cerebral. Quite literally. This zombie plague is the result of human intellect, and its purpose is to rewrite the human brain, to make us less singular and more of a colony organism. In a fit of academic jealousy, renegade researcher Suh Young-cheol (Koo Kyo-hwan) unleashes his virus in the middle of a symposium that happens, in a clear nod to Dawn of the Dead, to be taking place in a very packed mall. Transmission is immediate, transforming the infected into snarling beasts who run on all fours – the first of many ways that these prove not to be your regular zombies.

Colony is almost like Resident Evil but stripped of all the excessively complicated mythology and extraneous supernatural elements. Yeon instead concentrates on the basic idea of evil scientists poking at the natural order just to see what happens.

Both Suh and writer/director Yeon are fascinated by slime mold, a lifeform that can operate as a single cell organism or as a connected colony, as circumstances require, and are capable of communication through chemicals. That’s expressed first in the excessive mucus that the infected leave on every surface they touch, and secondly by how they change. The arc of zombie development has all too often been for them to become more humanlike again, but Yeon presents them as developing to become more suited to their current task. If they start walking on two feet, it’s not because they want to be regular people but because that’s more efficient for a biped. That slime mold connection allows them to transmit their learned lessons to other members of the colony, resulting in one of the film’s most eerie images as they all wordlessly sync up.

Suh’s surname translates to English as “calmly,” which is apt because he’s the only person to have nothing to worry about. Not only has he developed and taken the antidote, it’s also made him basically invisible to the infected. Koo invests him with a horrifying academic detachment and so, suitably, the only people capable of really taking him on are also research scientists. Trapped inside the increasingly goo-covered storefronts are biotechnologists and former married couple Kwon Se-jeong (Jun Ji-hyun) and Han Gyu-seong (Go Soo), who are able to capture enough anecdotal evidence to extrapolate theories about the infected’s behavior. Meanwhile, Hyan’s second wife, Gong Seol-hee (Shin Hyun-been), heads to Suh’s lab to find an external solution. While there are plentiful action sequences, endless suspenseful survival horror, and a lot of biting, Colony is that rare horror movie where the scientific method goes beyond a few pseudo-equations on a white board.

That emphasis seems like Yeon pulling back from the somewhat excessive and mawkish sentimentality that defined Train to Busan. This time, he gets distracted by too many supporting characters, most of whom have a whiff of motivation and are ultimately there to serve as fodder for the infected. Indeed, despicable as he is, Suh is probably the most rounded character, with even the biotechnologist protagonists given little depth in their love triangle. But when Yeon keeps his eye on big thrills and the treacherous politics of research science, Colony is a mostly successful experiment.

Colony

2026, R, 122 min. Directed by Yeon Sang-ho. Starring Koo Kyo-hwan, Jun Ji-hyun, Go Soo, Shin Hyun-been, Ji Chang-wook, Kim Shin-rok.

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3 out of 5.

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