Yeon Sang-ho New Zombie Movie

A throwaway line early in “Colony,” Yeon Sang-ho’s latest follow-up to his 2016 monster hit “Train to Busan,” between an underdog brother-sister pair of characters, suggests that leaving his job as a mall security guard and the grind of her wheelchair-bound life as an IT employee to go camping would feel like entering civilization. Amid the frenzy, Yeon will shove the siblings (and us) into his newest concocted outbreak of the rabidly moving dead — even more horrific this time thanks to their state-of-the-art bone-crunching limb contortions and green-ghoulish, goo-smattered faces. The word “civilization” can unfairly adjust our expectations.

Marooned inside a thirty-story office retail tower in downtown Seoul, a group of survivors, some of whom are attending a glossy, surely innocuous corporate biotech conference, find themselves in gymnastic battle with a sudden eruption of furiously tactile quadrupedal zombies who are able to — wait for it — communicate with each other. It’s collective intelligence, the hive mind, ants, anthills, and pheromones! That’s the concept, as the script, and of course the coincidentally present scientist characters, repeatedly explain, as though we haven’t read Steven Johnson’s 2002 Barnes and Noble bestseller, “Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software!”

Yeon is diligent in plumbing “communication,” one of the most bastardized notions across cultures, a bright-eyed teacher’s pet solution to vanquish ineptitude and automation. The Korean action master actually does well to maintain at least an internally coherent argument supporting delusional antagonist, Dr. Suh Young-Chul’s (Koo Kyo-Hwan) belief that perfectly communicating zombies represent a second cognitive revolution with a firmer right to God’s green earth than any siblings’ desire to escape the capitalist, ableist grind. Once the bitten turn, the rules established by Yeon’s script (co-written with Choi Gyu-seok) allow them to coordinate their attacks with more menace, to detect human faces (even if they are cardboard popups straddled on makeshift roombas) as though targets of a sinister algorithm, to morph without a trace of whiplash into bipedalism, and to process new commands with a wait time as reasonable as forced iOS update.

And like all sincerely written characters, the group of survivors, led by a capable but unidimensional burnt out academic Kwon Se-Jeong (Gianna Jun, returning to the big screen after eleven years), reliably and obediently decode the breathless evolution of the dead in real time. It makes for a compact, legible, and commercial horror-thriller that can be enjoyed inside a movie theater. These are not throwaway virtues in 2026, when the world is increasingly colonized by soulless vertical drama templates and is emptied of literacies, as seen when college students struggle to make any sense of the first seven paragraphs of a Dickens novel.

Unfortunately, the film’s ambitions and integrity remain contained in other major ways as well. Except for brother and sister, played respectively by Ji Chan-wook and Kim Shin-rock with a flammable likability and outstanding physicality — the latter compliment must be extended to the entire cast, especially the more than dozen choreographers Yeon hired to nail the signature monstrous transformation — there is no one else’s fate to become really emotionally invested in.

Kwon becomes a lone wolf of sorts after she quickly loses someone she cares about. Her primary contribution is to punctually and accurately hypothesize that the zombies are exchanging information, that they will continue to adapt in unpredictable ways as they suddenly go into spasming kumbaya learning mode (definitely unsettling to witness when it first happens), and that they are in fact being controlled by someone more nefarious — which tugs the carpet off of the classic scientific definition of collective intelligence, something the film happily glosses over.

Similarly, that someone more nefarious, Dr. Suh — a prototypical clean-cut, gelled-hair boy in a man’s body — nurses a bitter grudge against the CEO of the biotechnology company he works for as an in-house researcher. The resident evil has injected himself with the vaccine before unleashing the virus. He literally embodies the solution for humanity, and the police and government have barked orders to keep him alive. But why do we care about his tyrannical resentment? The script tells us too little too late. There are others as well, like a special investigator character working from the outside, who feels like an afterthought in the writing process, and some teenage bullies who meet delicious ends. 

It would be unjust to say that these characters are mere plot devices, not the least because cinematographer Byun Bong-sun, sound designer Kim Sok-won, and head of makeup Kim Hyun-jung have collaborated wonderfully to render them specific and spirited amidst the action. Humans get bitable closeups; blocking and mise-en-scene are often thrilling, and a whole array of genre-chewy material allows the cast to get their shining moments.

In that sense, “Colony” feels more vital than Yeon’s “Busan” sequel “Peninsula.” The audience is relieved of the prior editions’ boggling tsunami wall of zombies. Here, Byun’s camera focuses in on several undead, their eyes flashing with a cruel shade of mother-of-pearl. One shot of the paralyzed undead feels like a 36-year-later update to Edward Scissorhands’ sculpture garden: a frozen ballet of coked-out EDM break dancers waiting for sublimation. Sprinkled throughout are cunning twists too, the devilish mind magic of it all, and of course, tragic self-sacrifices mostly shorn of the melodrama that dampened the ending of “Busan.”

Bioterrorism can only go so far as breaking news, however. The metaphor of perfect communication as nodding to our contemporary AI revolution is specious beyond a point. Besides, communication is more precious as a ritual than the film’s story device of one-way authoritarian transmission. “Colony” is literal and uncritical in the application of its ideas so that genuine fear is obliterated in exchange for a blasé familiarity. We don’t expect superlative fascist critique at every turn, or a treatise on team-level failure within behemoth institutions, but at least bring emotionality and intimacy with your more clear-eyed pacing.

As I watched the survivors scramble towards the rescue team rumored to be on the roof of Doongwoori Building, I found myself pining for the otherworldly dance scene between Ralph Fiennes’ iodine-covered Dr. Ian Kelson and his morphine-struck, big-dong zombie mate Samson, in Nia DaCosta’s comparatively ultra original “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.” There were coked-out action zombies in DaCosta’s film, too, but her script enshrined the idea of “memento mori,” which entails having grace as you remember you must eventually die. Yeon might be a very good student of the genre, and the deck he crafts is often masterful. It’s just that the communication lessons and memory of human loss don’t hit hard enough as genre lovers on the brink of some AI-enabled civilizational collapse need them to right now.

Grade: C+

“Colony” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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