‘Colony’ review: ‘Train To Busan’ director Yeon Sang-ho returns with fun, forgettable zombie horror

Dir/scr: Yeon Sang-ho. South Korea. 2026. 122mins

A gleaming high-rise building in downtown Seoul becomes the epicentre of a biological terror attack in Yeon Sang-ho’s propulsive, entertaining new horror. At a narrative level, it pulls from modern anxieties surrounding surveillance, the unfettered spreading of information and the trauma of contagion (and indeed lockdown), But, as you would expect from the director of 2016’s Train To Busan, Colony’s main draw is its visuals, its carefully choreographed action sequences unfolding at a breakneck pace saturated by lashings of gore.

Carefully choreographed action sequence unfold at a breakneck pace 

Ten years on, Yeon clearly still knows how to plays with genre to inventive, crowd-pleasing effect. Unsurprisingly given the director’s pedigree – alongside Train To Busan ($94m worldwide) he has also directed 2020 sequel Peninsula ($43m) and 2016 animated prequel Seoul Station – the film had sold to myriad territories, including the US and UK/Ireland, ahead of its premiere in Cannes Midnight strand. It should easily attract the late-night horror hoards, even if it’s unlikely to make as much of an impact as Train To Busan.

The story here is very straightforward. Disgruntled former bio-tech employee Young-chul (Peninsula star Koo Kyo-hwan) unleashes a virus that turns everyone it infects into contorting, snarling maneaters. (Young-chul is out for revenge because his research ideas have been stolen, although dramatic motivation and character development are not a major concern here). The virus is spread through bites and bodily fluids and, says Young-chul, can only be stopped by the antibodies he has injected into himself. And with the building locked down by authorities, a rag-tag group of survivors – including professor Se-jeong (Gianna Jun), security guard Hyun-seok (Ji Chang-wook) and his wheelchair-bound IT whizz sister Hyun-hee (Kim Shin-rock) – must track down Young-chul and get him to the roof if they have any chance of being saved by the rescue team.

Like Train To Busan, Colony operates in a confined location, and Yeon and cinematographer Byun Bong-sun make the most of the high-rise tower’s multitude of different spaces, from the vast to the claustrophobic. Early sequences in its gleaming mall obviously call to mind Dawn Of The Dead, George A Romero’s classic of the genre, while offices, security rooms, lifts and basements present ample opportunity for Yeon to showcase his eye for composition and detail. He began his career as an animator, and that acute awareness for visual composition has certainly bled into his live action features; he and cinematographer Byun know exactly how to frame their scenes, and how to use colour, for maximum effect.

That’s particularly the case when there are zombies involved; whether they are crawling animalistically across the floor, contorting into uncanny shapes or piling themselves up, they are the stars of the show. That the virus has made them into something of a hive mind, and they learn, evolve and share information – the location of the humans, for example, or new skills like walking on two legs  – adds an intriguing new element akin to something like The Last Of Us. But it serves more as a way to keep the zombies into the foreground than as a fully explored idea.

There’s also arguably not enough of the zombie action to sustain the film’s two-plus hour running time; unlike with Train To Busan, the human survivors have plenty of places to hide and there are long sequences of the group planning strategies or trying to figure out Young-chul’s plan. That would be fine, but none of these characters have a great deal of depth; Se-jeong seems to exist purely as an expositional frog’s chorus, while a trio of teenagers are there to make stupid decisions and put everyone in even more danger. Brother and sister Hyun-seok and Hyun-hee are the film’s most interesting, as they bring genuine emotion and pathos to their sibling relationship.

Similarly, the narrative’s deeper ideas of surveillance, of the spread of information (and misinformation) as something of a virus, are also not explored in any great detail beyond adding an additional level of peril. But that may not matter to horror audiences and, as a modern zombie movie, Colony certainly has a satisfying bite.