Joyce Glasser reviews Colony (August 28, 2026), Cert. 15, 123 mins.
Yeon Sang-ho is the South-Korean writer-director whose Train to Busan is one of the best zombie movies and horror-action movies ever made. If you can achieve a critical and box office success with a zombie movie in 2016, you’d be daft not to try it again. Yeon Sang-ho did that his sequel, Peninsula, but the results were disappointing. He’s back in form with Colony, a zombie movie that cleverly targets our fears about technology, infectious diseases and scientists who want to play God.
Yeon Sang-ho quickly dispenses with the set-up. A mentally unhinged and vengeful scientist, Seo Young-chul (Koo Kyo-hwan), announces to the police that he will launch a bio-terrorist attack at the Doongwoo-ri Building. We watch as he injects himself with what everyone suspects is the vaccine to the bioweapon he has created using the properties of mutated slime mold.
While this is going on, Kang Woo-chul the CEO of Chains Bio, a cutting edge conglomerate blurring the lines between technology and biology, is in the building. He is giving a presentation on, not so coincidentally as it turns out, the cell regeneration capabilities of slime mold.
In the audience is Kwon Se-jeong (Jun Ji-hyun) an attractive biotechnology professor who can’t keep a job or a husband. Handsome, generous and caring, Kwon’s ex-husband, Han Gyu-sung (Go Soo), tells her she rubs people the wrong way and alienates friends. One reason might be that Kwon has a strong, independent personality, and the other might be that she is smarter than anyone else. He tells she needs to find a friend she can rely on.
Han has invited Kwon to the presentation because he wants to find her a job before breaking the news that he and his second wife, Gong Seol-hee (Shin Hyun-been) are emigrating abroad for work. Much later we learn that Gong Seol-hee, who we first see at home with her and Han Gyu-Sung’s daughter, is a leading biotechnologist brought in by the authorities to investigate and try to find solutions to this national crisis.
After the presentation, Han Gyu-sung is eager to introduce his ex-wife to Kang Woo-chul, but the CEO receives a call from the counter terrorism squad and rushes upstairs to his office. There he encounters Seo Young-cheol a disgruntled scientist who accuses Kang Woo-chul of stealing his research while Kang accuses Seo of wanting to destroy humanity.
Seo Young-cheol announces that Kang will become the head of his new humanity and injects him with the bioweapon. In a balletic sequence we witness the CEO’s horrific contortions as he turns into a zombie in a suit and tie.
Oblivious to what is happening on the third floor, security guard Choi Hyun-seok (Ji Chang-wook) accompanies his mobility-impaired sister, Hyun-hee (Kim Shin-rok) shopping in the shops below the offices. Hyun is an IT professional and has her heroic moment when the survivors gather in the control room that soon becomes a prison.
Kwon, Han, Choi, Hyun and a group of young people with their own backstories, take shelter in a shop when the first zombies descend.
The authorities, and most of the people trapped in the building have a problem that is soon a conflict of interest. Seo Young-cheol should not be killed because he is the vaccine and their only hope of stopping the contagion. But the longer he survives, apparently protected from the zombies himself by his vaccine, the more people inside are killed.
Kwon is nothing if not observant and quick. She realises that Seo Young-cheol is communicating with the zombies, who, she has already figured out, imitate humans and learn quickly, a bit like AI. Early on Kwon uses this knowledge to trick the zombies and buy the survivors time to move throughout the building.
As the plot thickens, and the number of zombies multiply, Gong and counter terrorism police dressed in PPE, enter Seo Young-cheol’s former laboratory and find a clue when the number one monkey is killed, causing hundreds of infected monkeys to drop – presumably dead.
As the only remaining human biotechnologist in the building, and the smartest, and most fearless person as well, Kwon leads the diminishing group of survivors while figuring out how to outsmart the sociopathic human vaccine.
In what becomes a satisfying female buddy story Han Gyu-sung’s two wives, one divorced, the other (spoiler alert) a new widow and single mother, join forces to save Seoul – and humanity. Temporarily at least, Gong becomes that friend Kwon needs.
Watching the characters reveal their true selves in their quest to survive, is matched by watching Yeon Sang-ho orchestrate the physical movements of his huge cast of zombies, many of whom are professional dancers. There is more dance and stunt work than CGI and the film is all the better for it. If the onslaught of the killer hordes and the narrow escapes (or not) of the survivors grow a bit monotonous, and Kwon’s quick thinking strains credibility, Colony is a brilliantly crafted film and a visceral treat.
