Colony is a film I have been looking forward to for ages, and I wasn’t too disappointed either, because it has some genuinely good ideas, and some great action, but the characters and story never quite reach the level of the film’s best sequences.
This Is a Very Good Looking Zombie Movie
Colony looks bloody fantastic for quite a lot of its 122-minute running time, and Yeon Sang-ho clearly knows exactly how he wants this thing to move, where the movie has a very clean visual style, with the expensive Seoul building giving him plenty of glass, metal, corridors, elevators, shops and other places for people to run around while something horrible chases them, which could easily have made the film feel a bit too polished, but the violence keeps dragging it back into horror. – there is plenty of blood here, and plenty of people getting absolutely wrecked.
But lets talk about the infected, which is easily my favorite thing about Colony, mainly because Yeon doesn’t just take the usual zombie and make it run faster, as these things actually change, and as the film continues, they become more coordinated, which gives the survivors a much bigger problem than simply having a load of angry corpses running toward them.
The idea behind this was apparently tied directly to Yeon’s interest in collective intelligence and the effect of artificial intelligence on individuality, which is a much more specific idea than the usual zombie movie excuse for having monsters behave differently, and I have to applaud it a lot.
So here, when one infected creature learns something, that knowledge can become useful to the others, which also means some of the usual tricks characters use in zombie movies don’t stay useful forever, because the enemy is basically getting an education every time the humans screw something up.
And humans screw things up a lot.
Jun Ji-hyun Is Better Than the Material
Jun Ji-hyun is good here, and I think the film is better whenever it gives her something to actually do rather than just having her react to whatever ridiculous thing is happening around her.
She plays Kwon Se-jeong, a biotechnology professor, and that profession isn’t just there because the screenplay needed somebody who could explain what the hell was happening, because her knowledge actually becomes part of the way she approaches the situation, which is certainly good, because horror movies have a habit of giving characters useful jobs and then immediately forgetting about them.
She has this fairly dry quality that works well with the material, and I liked that she doesn’t suddenly turn into some unstoppable action superhero just because the movie needs her to kick somebody through a window, as yes, she’s capable, but she still looks like someone who is having an absolutely miserable day.
The rest of the cast is strong as well, with Koo Kyo-hwan, Ji Chang-wook, Kim Shin-rock, Shin Hyun-been and Go Soo joining Jun. Koo in particular gets to play a character who is considerably less straightforward than some of the others, and he has the kind of face that can make a perfectly normal reaction look slightly suspicious.
Go Soo is also worth mentioning because he isn’t just there as another recognizable name, because his relationship with Se-jeong gives the film some of its more personal moments without turning the whole thing into an emotional hostage situation.
Yeon Sang-ho Knows This Genre
Yeon Sang-ho, as you will probably know, directed Train to Busan in 2016 and followed that with Peninsula in 2020, so he’s been playing with infected people, confined spaces and mass panic for a while now.
But Colony is completely separate from that franchise, which gives Yeon room to mess around with the basic rules, as while there are still obvious similarities in the way people are trapped together and forced through increasingly dangerous spaces, the film’s central idea about collective intelligence helps give it its own identity.
It also helps that the movie doesn’t spend the entire running time trying to remind you that Yeon directed Train to Busan, because there is nothing more irritating than a director making a new movie and spending two hours desperately trying to recreate the thing everyone liked last time.
Yeon has also talked about the film in terms of individuality and collective intelligence, and you can see that idea running through the way the infected operate, and the funny thing is that the movie doesn’t need a huge speech explaining this every five minutes because the basic horror idea already makes the point.
The infected are becoming more effective because they function together, while the humans are generally more effective when they actually think for themselves, which creates a nice little conflict between individuality and conformity without the film needing to turn into a two-hour lecture about technology.
There is also a lot of stuff about surveillance, information spreading and the aftermath of contagion, where some of it works better than other parts, but I think the movie is at its best when these ideas are buried inside the horror rather than when it starts explaining what they mean.
It Does Start Running Out of Steam
My biggest problem with Colony is that it is too long for the amount of story it actually has – two hours and two minutes isn’t outrageous for a modern horror movie, but Colony has stretches where you can definitely feel the momentum slipping on several occasion.
It certainly isn’t boring, which is important to mention, but I definitely felt the film stretching material that would have worked better if it had been trimmed down a little, and this is also where the characters become a problem – Jun Ji-hyun is good enough to make Se-jeong work, but some of the supporting characters don’t get enough development to make me care about them as much as the film clearly wants me to, and for me, zombie movies live or die on whether I care about the people being chased.
And unlike Train to Busan, Colony does not nail that element as well as I had hoped.
Overall Verdict
Colony certainly made me enjoy zombie movies again for a couple of hours, mainly because the infected actually have something new going on rather than simply being another bunch of people with bad skin and a serious attitude problem.
I liked the action, I liked Jun Ji-hyun, and I really liked the way the infected develop throughout the movie, but I just wish the screenplay had been trimmed and the supporting characters had been given a bit more substance, but it’s certainly clever in places and occasionally nasty as hell, and while I don’t think it comes close to Train to Busan, I had a pretty good time with it.
More Asian horror reviews.
- The East Palace (2026) Review: Ghosts, Curses and Palace Secrets
- Noroi: The Curse Review: A Found Footage Horror That Gets Under Your Skin
- One Cut of the Dead Review: A Zombie Movie That Is Much More Than It First Appears
- The Medium (2021) Review: Creepy, Disturbing and Brutal
- Incantation (2022) Review: This Horror Film Wants You to Join the Curse
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