Colony

by Hope Madden

Before filmmaker Yeon Sang-ho thrilled and devastated in equal measure with his 2016 zombie masterpiece Train to Busan, he scared us with its animated prequel (Seoul Station). The filmmaker book a break from the undead after the underwhelming Busan sequel Peninsula, turning to religious horror and crime thrillers.

And while his latest, Colony, is not technically a zombie movie because the ravenous hordes are not, in face, undead, you should still steer clear of their mouths.

Colony is sort of REC meets Dawn of the Dead, but with a hive mind, a little 28 Days Later, a touch of The Thing, and a lot of mucous.

Professor Se Jeong (Jun Ji-Hyun) attends a conference that detours to chaos when a disgruntled scientist unleashes a biochemical that mutates the affected into a zombie-like mob with a single consciousness. As SWAT quarantines the building, which is attached to a mall, Se Jeong must try to deliver Patient X to the rescue team for use as a vaccine against infection.

The film seems to have a lot on its mind: the surveillance state, contagion anxiety and lockdown trauma, disinformation and vaccines, even a very polite form of fascism. And at just over 2 hours, you’d think Colony might have mined those ideas a little more powerfully.

Instead, it hints at these, mainly borrowing pretty liberally from films that dug in deeper. Nor does Yeon develop the emotional connections that has me bawling every time I watch Busan, although solid performances help the characters draw your empathy.

Still, the filmmaker injects an intriguing element with the communication aspect—the infected being able to share information, even see what each other sees. And his precisely choreographed bloody, gory, gooey action mayhem is again on point.

Colony won’t shred your nerves or emotions the way Train to Busan did, but maybe it’s unfair to expect Yeon to meet that high water mark. It’s a mainly clever, well staged and quick paced action horror.