Colony
Writers: Yeon Sang-ho, Choi Gyu-seok
Director: Yeon Sang-ho
Cast: Jun Ji-hyun, Koo Kyo-hwan, Ji Chang-wook, Kim Shin-rok, Shin Hyun-been, Go Soo
I'm going to be up front with y'all on this: I'm tired of zombies. I've been tired of zombies since the days of peak Walking Dead universe madness, and I'm still tired. Reviewing films is about meeting those films where they are, yes, but it's also about the personal connection you as a critic make with the film in question, so I feel it's important to level with anyone reading this. There are exceptions (the 28 Years Later films have so far worked), but zombie movies mostly bounce off me these days.
And yet if anyone could yank me up and out of that particular rut, you'd think it would be Yeon Sang-ho, the director of Train to Busan, an undeniable force in the world of Korean horror, zombie horror, and global horror. He's a master of his particular form, and his new film, Colony, promised to evolve his take on the zombie subgenre yet again. I came to this film full of excitement, hoping the film would jolt me out of my funk. What I found was a movie packed with undeniable style, inventive setpieces, and some truly gnarly creature work that still, on an emotional and thematic level, left me surprisingly cold.
The film begins on a very promising note, not with an out-of-nowhere zombie attack, but with an advance warning from scientist turned bio-terrorist Seo Young-cheol (Koo Kyo-hwan), who calls the police to announce his intention to stage an attack on a massive office building and shopping center. As authorities rush to lock down the building and prevent an outbreak, Seo injects himself with the only vaccine to whatever's about to happen, then unleashes a weapon that turns anyone it infects into a horde of devouring monsters.
As the outbreak spreads, trapping everyone inside the skyscraper, we get to know a group of would-be survivors, chief among them Kwon Se-jeong (Jun Ji-hyun), a biotech professor who showed up to the building hoping to get a job at one of the tech companies inside. As other survivors gather around her, including a security guard (Ji Chang-wook), his paraplegic sister (Kim Shin-rok), and her own ex-husband (Go Soo), Kwon fights to stay alive as she learns more about the strange outbreak, and the strange behavior of its infected.
The film's title gives you a clue to this strange behavior, as Colony draws immediate parallel between its infected and creatures like ants and fungus, who communicate through things like pheromones and mucus. These creatures, once human and now transformed into something more like mucus-spouting zombies, move as a kind of hive, following each others' leads like a group of soldier ants. More than that, though, they learn. As they learn, they share information with each other and grow more sophisticated. This forces Kwon and the survivors around her to adapt and find new defensive strategies as they fight through the building on a quest to reach Seo, get his antidote, and save themselves.
This is such a conceptually fertile place to launch a movie, and Yeon wastes no time taking full advantage of the stage he's set. As his survivors move from locked room to locked room, trying to out-think a constantly evolving hivemind, we get shades of Dawn of the Dead as they hang out in a sporting goods store, bits of Train of Busan as the survivors expose their vulnerabilities, and loads of inventive violence as our human characters try everything from changing their appearance to changing their scent to escape the growing horde. Visually, it's a feast, whether we're talking about the staging of the action or the way the zombies themselves move, and how that changes over time. Even when the film has devolved into all-out chaos, Yeon finds a way to inject moments of quiet, effortlessly nail-biting tension into the narrative, including one sequence at a parking garage that I'll be thinking about for quite a while. There is, it should be clear by this point, style to spare in this film.
What was missing for me, though, particularly in light of Yeon's other films in the horror space, was a real emotional connection. The script, credited to Yeon and Choi Gyu-Seok, certainly leaves room for emotional connections, laying out family ties and character arcs with practiced ease, but the film never quite embraces all that space for gut punches. There's nothing really wrong with the script or the performances, exactly. Everyone's working well together and delivering on the setups of the story, particularly Jun and Koo, who's having a blast playing a villain, but it just never seems to reach the highest highs that we all know Yeon is capable of bringing out of a horror narrative. It's tough to pin down why, but I think some of it has to do with the balance the film tries to strike between a character-driven narrative and a larger thematic exploration of what it means when tech overlords try to mutate the rest of us into something like a hive of rabid consumers with little else in our heads. There's fertile ground, there, but even over its two-hour runtime, Colony never quite fulfills either of these parallel thematic explorations, leaving us with something that looks, sounds, and moves great, but never quite hits you in the heart. It feels like the grander scale and conceptual daring of the film has crowded out any chance of taking big emotional swings, and that's a shame.
Is some of this feeling because of my souring on zombie movies? Maybe. I'm willing to leave space for that, which means that a lot of you out there might come out of Colony finding certain visceral and emotional beats hit you like a truck when, for me, they were simply glancing blows. Even if the film's characters and emotional beats are underwhelming, Yeon Sang-ho can still direct the hell out of a zombie picture, and that means that Colony is worth seeing even if you're hesitant.
Colony opens in theaters August 28.
