Review: COLONY Unleashes the Horrors of Hive Mind Zombies

Yeon Sang-ho fastened the zombie genre to a car battery and jolted it to life with Train to Busan. In Colony, he pushes for further evolution and originality. Where The Last of Us plays with the fungal nightmare of a bio-zombie dystopia, Sang-ho’s take on similar storytelling is driven by the intensity of 28 Days Later infecteds, who go all Dawn of the Dead meets [REC] 2 in a quarantined mall-skyscraper. It’s a fast-paced take on acrobatic zeds with a hive mind twist—Cirque du Soleil of the Dead—and yet missing the epic breakneck punch of Train to Busan.

According to Sang-ho, he conceptualized Colony as his most “commercial” film, aiming for big-bad theatrical thrills. Mission accomplished in that department, although the story’s shapeshifting mechanics throw a wrench in momentum.

Jun Ji-hyun stars as Kwon Se-jeong, an ex-biotechnology professor who finds herself trapped inside Seoul’s (fictional) Dongwoori Building amidst a catastrophic bioterrorism outbreak. The blame lies on Seo Young-cheol (Koo Kyo-hwan), a shunned scientist who seeks vengeance against his old company, Chains Bio. It’s during a conference in the Dongwoo-ri Building, led by Chain Bio’s CEO, where Young-cheol unleashes a mutated mold virus that turns anyone compromised into a sprinting, heat-seeking zombie missile. Even worse, the infected share a single consciousness and collectively adapt to become better predators. Se-jeong’s only hope is to rely on her knowledge and keep the colony guessing, lest she join the herd.

Sang-ho has no problem delivering intense action-horror set pieces (re: Train to Busan, Peninsula). In Colony, that full-throttle attitude translates from claustrophobic train cars to sporting goods stores and high-rise corridors. There isn’t much space, and yet Sang-ho keeps the tension high as non-bitten characters flee from athletic zombies with a no-brakes mentality. The mutants hurl one another, contort into unbelievable shapes, and have a rabid ferocity that heightens the chaos of encounters. Stab and slice your way through one wave, and seven more come crashing down—hopeless, harrowing, yet continually exciting.

The script, written by Sang-ho and Choi Gyu-seok, bites into a harder sci-fi concept about weaponized yellow slime that feeds off the terrors of moldy mind control. The follies of corporate research mean cell regeneration tech is cooked into a killer plague. Intrigue builds, pushing the subgenre’s treatment of zombie blueprints, but the depiction is also uneven, as the moldpeople keep thwarting Se-jeong’s escapes by processing new data. Colony feels like video game levels the survivors must face, with new puzzles to solve each time, which disrupts the narrative pacing. It feels like Sang-ho wants us to experience something different scene by scene, a detriment to throughlines.

Sang-ho is also juggling many characters, most of whom are meant to have standout moments. The security officer (Ji Chang-wook) and his disabled sister (Kim Shin-rok); the counter-terrorism agent grump (Lee Joong-ok); Se-jeong’s helicopter ex-husband (Go Soo); etcetera, etcetera. But as the group fractures, so does the sense of motivation behind actions. And as the weight of actions is challenged, while governing agencies decide whether the infected are savable with a miracle vaccine, the frantic humans locked inside Dongwoori struggle to land every downbeat. Colony is as unforgiving as it is relentlessly action-packed, yet the tragedies that befall humans as they scamper like mall rats in George A. Romero’s nightmares can feel underdeveloped in the spotlight.

That said, Colony knows what you’re here for. Mucus, manic monkeys, ant farms, and parkour movements all play heavily into the film’s antagonistic fungi. Sang-ho does not fear slathering a milky goop all over his production; viscous ickiness drips from Young-cheol’s ranks. The promise of a rapidly growing bio-threat is met with effects designs that transform Dongwoori into a Petri dish of the damned. You’re strapping in for a roller coaster type of watch that’s all about being a scream machine, and yet Sang-ho doesn’t jettison style. For how clunky the character mapping can feel—not very Train to Busan in that way—there’s a lovely attention to tactile details that makes Colony more than just another T-Virus ripoff.

Colony would make a wonderful companion watch to David Yarovesky’s The Hive. Yarovesky gives us the low-budget, luminescent take on a campground hivemind, with Sang-ho’s big-budget South Korean zombie flick as the mainstream blowout. It’s a filmmaker tampering with what he knows—speedster undeads ruining innocent lives—with a laboratory-bred twist. Not the reinvention I’d hoped for, but still an exhilarating take on zombies that keeps butts in seats and smiles on faces.

Movie Score: 3.5/5