Colony (2026) Review 🧟♂️🧟♀️
One Mind, One Colony, and One Hell of a Zombie Problem
Let’s start by showing y’all the trailers shall we?
When I heard that Yeon Sang-ho, the director of Train to Busan, was returning to the zombie genre, I was immediately interested. Train to Busan remains my favorite zombie movie, and while Colony isn’t connected to that film, seeing Yeon return to this genre was enough to get my attention.
The trailers promised something familiar but also very different. We had another fast-moving Korean zombie outbreak, but these weren’t merely infected people running around trying to bite anything with a pulse. These things were learning. They were communicating. They were moving as a collective. And they were covered in this strange white substance that looked absolutely disgusting.
In other words, Yeon wasn’t just trying to make Train to Busan again, and thank God for that.
Colony runs about 122 minutes and is directed by Yeon Sang-ho from a screenplay by Yeon and Choi Gyu-seok.
Warning: This Movie Is VERY Gory
Before getting into the actual movie, I should probably give everyone a pretty substantial warning: this movie is fucking gory.
Colony absolutely earns its horror credentials when it comes to blood, violence and some genuinely nasty zombie imagery. People are bitten, ripped apart and eaten, bodies violently contort during infection, bones bend and snap, and the infected spend much of the movie covered in blood and this disgusting white mycelium-like slime.
And Yeon Sang-ho doesn’t exactly hide the carnage off-screen.
If you’re particularly sensitive to graphic violence, body horror, people being eaten alive or generally disgusting zombie imagery, Colony may be a rough watch.
So consider yourselves warned.
Warning: This Is a Foreign-Language Film With Subtitles
One other thing worth mentioning before we start: this is a Korean film, and you’ll be reading subtitles.
I know subtitles aren’t an issue for everyone, but I also know there are people who don’t enjoy watching movies where they have to read dialogue throughout, so it’s worth mentioning before you jump in.
Personally, that doesn’t bother me. I’m not going to avoid a movie just because it wasn’t made in English, especially when some of my favorite zombie movies have come out of South Korea.
But if you’re someone who strongly prefers English-language movies or doesn’t enjoy reading subtitles, just be aware of that going in.
Non-Spoiler Plot Overview
Professor Kwon Se-jeong attends a biotechnology conference inside a massive high-rise building in Seoul alongside her ex-husband, Han Gyu-seong. What initially looks like a rather ordinary professional event quickly becomes a nightmare after researcher Seo Young-cheol deliberately unleashes an experimental infection inside the building.
Authorities quarantine the facility, leaving Se-jeong and a small collection of survivors trapped inside with the rapidly growing infected population.
But these aren’t normal zombies.
The infected operate as a colony. When one learns something, the others can acquire that information. Something that successfully fools them once may not fool them twice. They observe human behavior, adapt to obstacles and gradually become more intelligent as the outbreak continues.
That immediately gives Colony one of the most interesting zombie concepts I’ve seen in quite some time.
Character Rundown
Jun Ji-hyun plays Kwon Se-jeong, a biotechnology professor who becomes our main protagonist. What I particularly like about Se-jeong is that the movie doesn’t suddenly turn her into an action superhero because she’s the lead. She’s useful because the specific problem they’re facing falls within her area of expertise. She understands collective behavior, observes what the infected are doing and develops theories that the survivors can test.
She’s intelligent without feeling artificially omniscient. She doesn’t stand in front of everyone announcing that she’s the chosen badass who’s going to save the day. She’s simply a human being whose particular knowledge happens to become incredibly valuable in this particular disaster.
Koo Kyo-hwan plays Seo Young-cheol, and somehow he’s simultaneously one of my favorite and least favorite parts of the movie. Young-cheol is completely fucking nuts, but his philosophy is at least interesting. He believes imperfect communication and individuality are responsible for human conflict, so his solution is to eliminate individuality altogether and merge humanity into a collective consciousness.
Yes.
He’s nuts.
But Koo Kyo-hwan is wonderfully unsettling in the role. Young-cheol can be frightening when he’s calmly walking among the infected without being attacked, yet later the movie pushes him so far toward supervillain territory that he starts resembling the Pied Piper of zombies.
Go Soo plays Han Gyu-seong, Se-jeong’s ex-husband. Initially I thought this dude was kind of a jagoff, especially when he didn’t believe Se-jeong’s explanation for arriving late. But the movie eventually gives him considerably more humanity than I expected.
Shin Hyun-bin plays Gong Seol-hee, Gyu-seong’s current wife and another scientist who becomes extremely important from outside the quarantined building. I especially enjoyed how Se-jeong and Seol-hee eventually complement each other scientifically rather than turning their relationship into some unnecessary drama about sharing the same man.
Ji Chang-wook plays security guard Choi Hyun-seok, who spends much of the film trying to protect his disabled older sister, Choi Hyun-hee, played by Kim Shin-rok. Their relationship provides some of the movie’s nastiest emotional material, especially once Young-cheol realizes exactly how he can exploit it.
Then we have the assortment of cops, businessmen and teenagers who get trapped alongside them. Some are sympathetic. Some are useful.
And some are complete fucking assholes.
Because apparently Yeon Sang-ho looked at that businessman from Train to Busan and thought, “You know what every zombie movie needs? At least one guy everyone wants the zombies to eat.”
The Zombies
I have to give Colony a ton of credit for its zombies because, for the majority of the movie, these things are absolute nightmare fuel. Yeon Sang-ho could have easily fallen back on the same fast zombies he used in Train to Busan, but instead he gives this movie’s infected their own identity, rules and increasingly horrifying abilities.
And first things first: you turn FAST.
This ain’t The Walking Dead, where somebody can get bitten and potentially spend hours or even days waiting for the inevitable. In Colony, once the infection takes hold, you’ve basically got enough time to think:
“Well, shit.”
And that’s about it.
We’re talking roughly seconds, around ten seconds tops in some of the transformations we see. It’s much closer to World War Z’s movie zombies, where infection can turn someone frighteningly quickly. There isn’t much opportunity to quarantine your bitten friend, have an emotional goodbye and spend half an episode debating what to do with them.
Bite → violent transformation → congratulations, there’s another zombie in the room.
And the transformation itself is fucking nasty. Victims collapse, their bodies violently twitch and contort, limbs bend at horrible angles and they vomit that disgusting milky-white substance associated with the infection. Then they’re back up and coming after you.
But their speed isn’t what makes these zombies special.
It’s their ability to learn.
The infected function as a colony. Information discovered by one can spread through the collective, meaning the survivors constantly have to change their strategies. Early in the movie they’re hilariously primitive. They’ll see a cardboard photograph of a person and basically go:
“HUMAN! YUM!”
Then spend several seconds biting fucking cardboard.
But eventually one realizes:
Wait. This isn’t a person.
And that lesson spreads.
That’s when the concept becomes terrifying, because you’re watching these creatures essentially level up throughout the movie.
They learn to distinguish humans more effectively. They learn smells. They recognize patterns. They mimic behavior. They can pretend to be dead. Eventually one of these fuckers is shakily using a security computer, tapping the controls with one finger to access surveillance cameras and locate survivors.
Then they learn language well enough to weaponize it.
Two survivors hear someone outside their hiding place announce:
“The evacuation team has arrived.”
They open the door.
Zombies.
FUCK THAT.
That’s no longer simply a zombie repeating words like a parrot. It’s using information to deceive its prey. It understands that frightened humans waiting for rescue are likely to open a door if they believe the evacuation team has arrived.
At another point Young-cheol can even use the colony’s shared vision to look through an infected person’s eyes and read the survivors’ group-chat messages off a phone.
That’s where Colony is at its absolute best.
Every time the humans think they’ve figured out these zombies, the colony learns something new and the rules change again.
And there’s something especially disturbing about their synchronized behavior. When new information travels through the colony, the infected can suddenly stop, tilt their heads and twitch together as though hundreds of human bodies are simultaneously downloading the same software update.
Later, when Young-cheol talks about eliminating individuality and bringing humanity together under one mind, the infected surrounding him respond in unison.
Dozens of bodies.
Dozens of mouths.
One voice.
That shit is creepy.
They’re not merely a horde anymore. They’re essentially one creature made out of hundreds of human bodies.
That’s why I wish the third act had continued leaning into this side of them instead of increasingly turning their intelligence into action spectacle. A zombie figuring out how to use CCTV to hunt me is infinitely scarier than watching a squad of zombies zip-line between skyscrapers while carrying their leader like they’re halfway through a fucking heist movie.
Give me the zombie quietly reading my text messages.
Give me the zombie lying to me through a locked door.
Give me the zombie that learns from the mistake I just watched another zombie make.
Those are fucking terrifying.
Pacing / Episode Flow
For roughly the first two-thirds of Colony, I was completely on board.
The movie has this claustrophobic survival-horror quality that reminded me why Yeon Sang-ho works so well with contained zombie stories. We’re trapped inside this enormous building with characters who don’t completely understand what they’re dealing with, and much of the suspense comes from watching them discover the rules.
Something works.
The zombies learn.
Now it doesn’t work anymore.
The survivors adapt.
The zombies adapt again.
It’s almost structured like a video game where the difficulty keeps increasing because the enemy is learning how you play.
The problem is the third act.
Once the story leaves behind much of that contained survival horror and expands into the streets, Colony starts feeling like an entirely different movie. Suddenly we have zombies using firearms, zip lines, vehicles, military equipment and Young-cheol walking around with his undead army like the goddamn Pied Piper.
I don’t inherently object to an action-heavy third act. The problem is that I kept wanting to go back to the movie I had been watching during the first two acts.
The earlier escalation made the zombies more frightening.
The later escalation often just makes them more spectacular.
There’s a difference.
Pros
The zombies are easily the biggest strength of Colony.
Yeon Sang-ho somehow managed to enter one of the most oversaturated horror genres imaginable and give me infected that genuinely felt different. These things start out almost embarrassingly stupid, but that’s the point. Their intelligence isn’t static. They learn collectively.
Watching that evolution is nightmare fuel.
They initially crawl around on all fours and can be fooled by images of human beings. Then they begin learning how humans move. They recognize scents. They understand increasingly complicated information. Eventually they can imitate human behavior and even use technology.
The best zombie ideas in Colony are the ideas that feel like they could only happen in Colony.
One of my favorite examples involves the survivors deliberately feeding the colony false information. If the infected share knowledge, then theoretically you can poison that shared knowledge. The survivors essentially teach the colony that a particular perfume smell means “human,” then use that misinformation against them.
THAT is clever.
It isn’t simply another way of killing zombies. It’s turning their greatest advantage into a weakness.
The physical performances are also fantastic. The infected don’t simply run around like conventional movie zombies. Their bodies twitch, shake and contort in these bizarre ways while still giving the impression that all of them are connected to the same larger organism. Even the strange white substance covering them gives these zombies an identity beyond the standard bloody zombie makeup.
I also appreciate that the movie doesn’t create one giant heroic lead who magically possesses every useful skill. Se-jeong understands the hive because biotechnology and collective behavior are things she actually understands. Hyun-hee understands the security system because she works with it. Other characters have their own skills and limitations.
They don’t make a heroic lead.
They make humans.
And humans sometimes panic, act selfishly, make mistakes or turn into complete douchebags when survival is on the line.
Cons
Unfortunately, the third act takes a pretty massive nosedive for me.
Again, I don’t hate the ideas behind the zombies evolving. I love that idea. My issue is how the movie chooses to visualize that evolution.
Watching a zombie shakily use one finger to operate a computer is fucking creepy.
Watching zombies understand surveillance cameras and use them to locate hiding survivors is creepy.
Watching zombies mimic an evacuation team to trick people into opening a door is REALLY fucking creepy.
Watching zombies drive around in vehicles?
I’m sorry, that starts getting goofy.
The first two acts repeatedly ask, “What terrifying new thing can the colony learn?”
The third act increasingly asks, “What cool action-movie thing can we make zombies do?”
I much prefer the first question.
The movie also occasionally falls back on zombie clichés despite having invented much more creative ideas itself. The biggest example is covering yourself with infected blood and mycelium to disguise your scent.
Come on.
The Walking Dead called. It wants its invisibility cloak back.
We’ve seen versions of this idea countless times. That’s especially disappointing in a movie where I could instead be watching a zombie read someone’s fucking group chat through another zombie’s eyes.
Can we go back to THAT!?
Then there’s the ending.
I hate this ending.
The movie gets to a perfectly creepy image involving the infected frozen like grotesque statues throughout the devastated streets, their mouths and eyes wide open and their bodies petrified in different positions.
That could have been such an eerie final image.
Instead we get dialogue about there being plenty of work left to do, the camera pulls away, we focus on one infected and—
Gee, I wonder what’s going to happ—
RAAAAAAARGH!
Yep.
Zombie wakes up.
Roll credits.
Go fuck off with an ending like that.
It’s such blatant, by-the-book sequel bait that I was practically performing the ending along with the movie before it happened.
“There’s much work ahead of us.”
Okay!
MOVIE, CARE TO SHOW ME ANY OF IT!?
Final Thoughts
Colony is frustrating in a very specific way because the things that don’t work stand beside things that work incredibly well.
For most of the movie, Yeon Sang-ho proves that there are still unexplored ideas in zombie fiction. The hive-mind concept is genuinely unsettling, the infected have a fantastic visual identity, their evolving intelligence constantly changes the rules, and the movie finds creative ways for humans to exploit a collective organism that can instantly share information.
I just wish the movie trusted those ideas all the way to the finish line.
I wanted more horror built around zombies learning human behavior.
More zombies reading messages.
More false information spreading through the colony.
More horrifying mimicry.
More moments where I realize these things have learned something they absolutely should not know.
Less Zombie Fast & Furious.
Still, when Colony works, it REALLY works. This is one of the more unique zombie concepts I’ve seen recently, and despite my problems with the third act and that awful sequel-bait ending, I had a great time with it.
Rating
8/10
Spoiler Warning
Okay, now we’re getting into everything.
The deaths.
The hive mind.
Mr. Vaccine.
Zombie Jesus.
The world’s shortest bully redemption arc.
The Pied Piper of zombies.
And enough white goo to make me seriously regret ever inventing the phrase “zombie cum.”
You have been warned.
Spore-lers
Yes.
Spore-lers.
Because if there were ever a movie where I had the opportunity to make that stupid fucking joke, it’s this one.
The movie actually begins with Seo Young-cheol doing something almost hilariously polite for a terrorist: he calls the authorities and tells them he’s about to conduct an “experiment” before correcting himself and essentially admitting that “terrorism” would be the more accurate description.
I can only imagine being the poor emergency operator.
“Excuse me?”
Young-cheol injects himself with his vaccine before heading into the building, which obviously becomes extremely important later.
Meanwhile, Se-jeong arrives late after her taxi drops her several streets farther away than requested. Her ex-husband Gyu-seong isn’t particularly interested in hearing the explanation, immediately earning himself some jagoff points.
The two attend the Chains Bio conference, where CEO Kang Woo-cheol discusses research involving collective intelligence and biotechnology. Se-jeong has also received a mysterious invitation involving the idea that imperfect communication is the source of tragedy.
After the presentation, authorities contact Kang because Young-cheol has announced his planned terrorist attack. Kang recognizes Young-cheol from the audience and heads away from the conference.
That’s when Young-cheol confronts him.
Young-cheol accuses Kang of stealing his research and begins explaining his grand vision. He doesn’t want humanity extinct. He wants humanity reborn into something beyond individual consciousness.
Kang basically responds by treating him like the fucking lunatic he is.
At one point Kang sarcastically laughs and claps at Young-cheol.
Young-cheol laughs and claps back.
Dude.
If the man you’re threatening is laughing and applauding while calling you insane, I don’t think he’s actually congratulating you.
Young-cheol injects Kang.
Kang manages to barricade Young-cheol inside the VIP area, but it’s too late. Kang stumbles away, vomits this disgusting milky white substance, collapses and violently contorts as his body transforms.
And thus begins the zombie-cum apocalypse.
Meanwhile, Gyu-seong has apparently decided to collect every death flag available.
He’s having lunch with Se-jeong. He video calls his current wife, Seol-hee, and their little daughter. He’s planning to move to California with them and start a new life.
Then he promises his daughter:
“Daddy’s coming home.”
Me:
No he fucking won’t.
Come on, movie.
You might as well have had the dude turn directly toward the camera and say:
“I’m really looking forward to being alive tomorrow!”
The outbreak reaches the survivors, and this is where Colony starts showing what makes its infected special.
Se-jeong accidentally discovers that darkness interferes with their ability to identify targets. The survivors eventually use cardboard human cutouts attached to Hyun-hee’s wheelchair as a decoy.
The zombies see human faces.
Zombie brain:
YUM.
They attack.
And start eating cardboard.
These things are fucking idiots.
For now.
It takes them a little while to realize they’ve been tricked, but once one learns the difference, that information can spread through the colony.
That’s the terrifying rule.
You can fool these things.
But probably only once.
During the rescue, one of the teenage girls panics. Her wonderful boyfriend initially tries helping her before essentially deciding, “Fuck this,” and running to safety without her.
Boyfriend of the year.
Gyu-seong goes back to save her and succeeds, but the infected catch him.
So the guy I initially thought was a douchebag ends up dying heroically.
And then the movie twists the knife.
His phone rings.
It’s Seol-hee and their daughter.
Se-jeong answers and has to tell Seol-hee that her husband is dead. Then his little daughter comes running toward the screen crying for Daddy.
Yeah.
That fucking hurt.
The survivors gradually realize that the infected behave similarly to colonies of ants. At one point the bullied teenager, So-eun, finds information about an ant mill, where ants following corrupted information can become trapped moving in a circle.
Gee.
I wonder if THAT’S going to come back later.
That isn’t Chekhov’s gun.
That’s Chekhov’s fucking artillery cannon.
The survivors then come up with one of my favorite plans in the movie.
If one infected learns something and that information spreads through the colony, what happens if you deliberately teach them something WRONG?
They use perfume to teach the colony that a particular smell means human.
Then they put that perfume on mannequins while disguising their own scent with antifreeze.
The zombies attack the mannequins.
THAT is exactly the kind of shit I wanted from this movie.
They’re essentially poisoning the zombie training data.
Eventually the survivors need Young-cheol because authorities believe his vaccine may be their way out. They retrieve him, handcuff him and begin taking him toward the evacuation point.
Unfortunately, somebody decided handcuffing the terrorist mastermind with his hands IN FRONT OF HIM was good enough.
Officer Doofus, everybody.
During the elevator ride, Young-cheol mysteriously comments on how fast one of the survivors had been running earlier, despite apparently having no way to know that.
Then he uses those conveniently accessible hands to open the elevator onto a zombie-infested floor.
Chaos follows.
People get bitten.
Young-cheol escapes.
Later, from the security room, the survivors watch LIVE CCTV and see Young-cheol approach infected Kang.
Young-cheol deliberately offers himself.
“Bite me.”
Kang does.
Young-cheol convulses, but because he vaccinated himself, he doesn’t transform normally.
Instead something much worse happens.
He connects to them.
His eyes become pale and he can apparently perceive the world through the infected. He has essentially uploaded himself into the zombie mainframe and become their de facto leader.
Zombie Administrator privileges unlocked.
The group manages to recapture and blindfold him.
They quickly realize talking about their plans around him might be a terrible idea, so they start communicating through a group chat instead.
Great idea!
Except an infected former member of their group still has a phone.
Young-cheol looks through that zombie’s eyes.
And reads their fucking group chat.
THAT is nightmare fuel.
This is what I mean when I say the movie’s best zombie ideas are the ones unique to Colony.
We’ve gone from:
Zombie sees human. Zombie bites human.
to:
THE ZOMBIES HAVE COMPROMISED OUR GROUP CHAT.
Meanwhile Hyun-hee remains behind in the security control room, guiding the survivors through the building using the cameras.
When Hyun-seok wants to return for his sister, Bong-seok decides she’s expendable because the group already has Mr. Vaccine.
This is where Bong-seok completes his transformation into Designated Zombie Movie Asshole™.
Se-jeong is actually the one person who defends Hyun-seok. She even grabs Bong-seok’s dropped gun and tries forcing everyone to wait while Hyun-seok goes back for Hyun-hee.
Young-cheol eventually sends the infected toward Hyun-hee.
Realizing her brother is coming back, she deliberately directs him into an elevator that cannot reach her floor so he won’t be able to save her.
She sacrifices herself.
And yes, at one point I described this by saying:
“Well… she had a good run.”
Except she didn’t.
Because she’s paralyzed.
🥁
I’m going to hell.
Hyun-seok completely breaks after losing her.
He sends the group a message telling them that they left his sister behind and let her die, so now he’s going to kill the vaccine.
Rambo mode activated.
Back with the other survivors, Bong-seok somehow becomes an even bigger asshole.
When the infected close in, he SHOOTS the suited survivor in the leg to use him as bait.
The injured man grabs Bong-seok and basically screams:
“HELP ME, YOU DOUCHEBAG! YOU’RE A COP!”
Bong-seok tries shooting him in the head.
Click.
Empty.
So he starts beating him with the gun instead.
Both get surrounded.
Both get eaten.
Both become zombies.
Good riddance.
Se-jeong, So-eun and the bully escape with Young-cheol and hide.
The bully begins crying and apologizing to So-eun for everything she’s done to her.
So-eun tells her that if she’s genuinely sorry, she can apologize properly when they both get out alive.
That’s actually a surprisingly mature response.
And apparently the bully takes that heartfelt moment very seriously for approximately four fucking minutes.
Because meanwhile the zombies have evolved again.
One of them reaches the security computer and starts shakily using ONE FINGER to enter commands.
Earlier:
🧟 CARDBOARD HUMAN! YUM!
Now:
🧟☝️ ACCESS SECURITY SURVEILLANCE.
That’s terrifying.
The infected use the cameras to locate the girls.
Then they arrive outside their hiding place and call out:
“The evacuation team has arrived.”
NOPE.
NOPE NOPE NOPE.
They aren’t simply making noises anymore.
They’re learning how human beings communicate and understanding what words will make frightened survivors voluntarily open the door.
And the girls fall for it.
The door opens.
Our newly remorseful bully sees zombies.
And immediately throws So-eun into them to save herself.
WELL, CLEARLY SHE WAS SORRY.
Couldn’t you tell?
Young-cheol gets up, removes his blindfold and looks down at So-eun.
Then he looks at the bully.
He remembers their conversation.
“You said you were going to apologize to her later.”
Oh no.
“Well, here’s your chance.”
So-eun gets back up infected.
Young-cheol essentially tells the bully to apologize.
So-eun bites her.
That’s fucking evil.
That’s also a fantastic villain line.
Elsewhere, Seol-hee’s investigation has produced another theory. Experiments involving infected monkeys suggest that killing the dominant host may freeze the entire colony.
Authorities identify Kang as the original human Patient Zero.
They kill him.
Everyone waits.
…
Nothing.
Welp.
So much for that.
Hyun-seok, meanwhile, has been John Wick-ing his way through the infected and eventually appears absolutely covered in their blood.
He’s no longer Security Guard Guy.
He’s Rambo.
He’s the fucking Boogeyman.
And then Young-cheol decides this poor bastard apparently hasn’t suffered enough.
He asks Hyun-seok whether he wants to reunite with his sister.
And out comes Hyun-hee.
Zombified.
And standing.
Yes.
Standing.
Young-cheol has essentially played God and made a paralyzed woman walk.
Except he hasn’t healed her.
He killed her and turned her body into a puppet.
That’s fucking horrible.
It reminded me of X-Men: Dark Phoenix, where Jean forces Charles Xavier’s paralyzed body to stand and walk up a flight of stairs against his will. Something that would ordinarily look miraculous becomes horrifying because the person whose body is doing it has absolutely no agency over what’s happening.
Here it’s even worse.
Young-cheol knows exactly what this image means to Hyun-seok.
And he uses Hyun-hee against her own brother.
That’s probably the most fucked-up thing Young-cheol does in the entire movie.
Eventually Se-jeong confronts Young-cheol, and we finally get his philosophy laid out more completely.
Despite his personal history and the theft of his work, he insists this isn’t about revenge.
He wants to eliminate individuality.
In his mind, individual consciousness creates imperfect communication. Imperfect communication creates misunderstanding. Misunderstanding creates conflict.
Therefore:
Get rid of individuality.
Everyone becomes one mind.
Problem solved!
😐
Sir.
There were several possible solutions between “people misunderstand each other” and “ZOMBIE HIVE MIND.”
And then we get one of the creepiest scenes in the entire movie.
Se-jeong is surrounded by infected.
But they’re not attacking.
They’re just standing there.
Perfectly still.
Young-cheol talks about humanity becoming one consciousness.
One mind.
And then all the zombies answer him in unison.
Something along the lines of:
“UNDER ONE MIND.”
Oh.
Fuck.
That.
This is where intelligent zombies work.
They’re not acting like individual people having conversations. They’re essentially one consciousness speaking through dozens of mouths simultaneously.
That’s horrifying.
The military eventually arrives and prioritizes extracting Young-cheol because he’s still considered Mr. Vaccine, while Se-jeong is basically left to fend for herself.
And this is where the movie starts losing me.
Young-cheol gets outside.
The infected begin behaving more and more like his personal army.
Military zombies use guns.
They coordinate tactical movements.
They use zip lines.
They take vehicles.
And Young-cheol starts walking around Seoul like the fucking Pied Piper of zombies.
We’ve gone from claustrophobic survival horror to:
ZOMBIE FAST & FURIOUS.
And that’s the fundamental problem I have with the third act.
The first two acts reveal intelligence to make the zombies more frightening.
The third act reveals intelligence to make them more spectacular.
Those aren’t the same thing.
Eventually Se-jeong starts pursuing Young-cheol through the chaos while Seol-hee helps guide her remotely.
And then we reach one of those moments where I genuinely wondered whether the movie had run out of cool ideas.
Se-jeong covers herself in infected blood and mycelium to disguise her scent.
Really?
We’ve gone from zombies accessing security cameras, reading group chats through one another’s eyes and impersonating rescue workers to:
Rub zombie shit all over yourself and become invisible.
The Walking Dead has entered the chat.
We’ve done this trope to death.
Can we PLEASE go back to zombies reading people’s fucking phones?
Then comes Chekhov’s artillery cannon.
Remember that ant mill?
Of course you do.
The movie practically highlighted it in fluorescent yellow.
Se-jeong puts her mycelium-covered coat over an infected zombie’s head.
And somehow this increasingly intelligent zombie apparently cannot figure out:
REMOVE COAT FROM HEAD.
This is a creature belonging to the same collective that learned how to operate security cameras.
But now:
🧟🧥
“I HAVE BEEN DEFEATED BY FABRIC.”
The zombie starts stumbling around.
The others follow its movement.
Soon the entire colony begins running in a giant circle, recreating the ant mill discussed earlier.
Young-cheol eventually goes into the middle and pulls the coat off the zombie.
And suddenly the infected freeze up.
Watching this for the first time, my reaction was basically:
The fuck just happened!?
Did you guys get tired!?
Need a little beauty sleep!?
The idea seems to be that the ant mill overloads the shared system and causes the infected to lose much of the knowledge they’ve accumulated.
And how do we discover they’ve regressed?
A bus arrives with an advertisement showing human beings on its side.
The zombies see the pictures.
And suddenly we’re back to:
🧟 PEOPLE!
They charge the fucking advertisement.
Which actually leads to an appropriately humiliating death for Young-cheol.
The man who spent the entire movie arguing that collective intelligence is superior to individuality gets knocked around and trampled by his own supposedly superior collective because they’re too stupid to distinguish an advertisement from actual people.
That’s pretty fucking poetic.
Young-cheol ends up near the burning wreckage and catches fire.
He continues attacking Se-jeong while burning, but eventually the flames completely overwhelm him.
Then he starts begging her for help.
And because he’s connected to the colony, the infected begin reacting to his agony.
Young-cheol writhes.
They writhe.
Young-cheol screams.
They scream.
The man who wanted humanity united under one consciousness finally gets exactly what he wanted.
His suffering becomes everybody’s suffering.
Young-cheol finally falls over dead.
And every infected person freezes.
Not collapses.
Freezes.
They’re petrified exactly where they were standing.
Some are twisted into strange positions.
Some have their heads tilted.
Their eyes remain wide open.
Their mouths hang open.
The streets suddenly look like some grotesque macabre art installation.
And THAT could have been a phenomenal final image.
Se-jeong eventually speaks with Seol-hee.
She knows people may blame her for killing the man they believed possessed the vaccine. Seol-hee is prepared to defend her, but Se-jeong essentially says she’s used to people disliking her for standing by what she believes.
Then:
“Besides, I think we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.”
Camera starts pulling away.
Me:
Ohhhh, I wonder what’s going to happen. Surely there isn’t going to be a jump—
Zombie:
RAAAAAAAARGH!
Me:
SHIIIIIIIIIT!
Roll credits.
Oh, go fuck off.
Seriously.
“There is much work ahead of us.”
MOVIE, CARE TO SHOW ME ANY OF IT!?
That’s one of the most blatant pieces of sequel bait I’ve seen in a while. It’s so by-the-book that I was doing live commentary predicting the fucking jumpscare while it happened.
And that’s ultimately where Colony leaves me.
There is a REALLY fucking good zombie movie in here.
For most of the runtime, I think we’re watching it.
These zombies are unique, disturbing and genuinely frightening. The concept of an infected colony that learns collectively gives Yeon Sang-ho an excuse to constantly change the rules without simply introducing bigger or stronger zombies.
The moments I’ll remember aren’t the zombies driving vehicles.
They’re the zombie shakily pressing computer buttons with one finger.
The zombies reading private messages.
The zombies pretending to be an evacuation team.
The zombies standing perfectly still around Young-cheol and speaking with one voice.
Those moments are nightmare fuel.
I just wish the entire movie had trusted those ideas.
The third act takes a nosedive into a completely different genre, some of the later survival mechanics retreat into incredibly familiar zombie tropes, and the ending might as well have had giant flashing letters reading:
PLEASE WAIT FOR COLONY 2.
But those problems don’t erase how much I enjoyed everything the movie got right.
Yeon Sang-ho managed to make zombies feel fresh again.
That’s not easy.
And even if Colony occasionally forgets what made its monsters so scary in the first place, when this movie is firing on all cylinders?
Holy shit.
8/10
Final Thoughts Addition
I think I finally found the exact moment where Colony crossed the line for me: when I started watching zombies zip-line between two towers while carrying Young-cheol like they were extracting their leader during a fucking heist.
Technically, I understand how we got here. The entire movie establishes that these zombies can learn, share information and gradually understand increasingly complicated human behavior. So I’m not arguing that the rules suddenly make it impossible for them to understand how a zip line works. My problem is what that evolution starts doing to the tone.
Earlier, watching a zombie shakily press buttons on a computer with one finger was nightmare fuel. Watching them access security cameras to locate survivors was terrifying. Watching Young-cheol read someone’s group chat through another zombie’s eyes was terrifying. Hearing zombies imitate an evacuation team to trick survivors into opening a door was even worse. Their growing intelligence made them scarier because I was constantly wondering what horrifying human behavior they would learn next.
But zombies zip-lining between skyscrapers while carrying their leader?
I’m sorry, that’s where I draw the line.
At that point I wasn’t thinking, “Oh God, they’re learning.”
I was thinking, “Why am I watching a zombie heist movie?”
It starts feeling less like an evolution of the claustrophobic horror from the first two acts and more like the movie desperately searching for increasingly elaborate action spectacle. That’s really the distinction for me: the first two acts use the zombies’ intelligence to make them more frightening, while the third act increasingly uses their intelligence to make them more spectacular.
And I vastly prefer the former.
These zombies didn’t need to become Seal Team Six Feet Under to scare me. They already scared the shit out of me when they learned how to read a fucking text message.
Anyways hope y’all enjoy today’s review, speaking of zombies here’s a clip from the next zombie film im excited for and it releases this month, anyways see yall then
