Colony (2026)

When I heard that director Yeon Sang-ho was giving us another spin on the zombie movie, after impressing so many horror fans with the brilliant Train To Busan, I knew I would make it a priority. When I saw the trailer, highlighting a premise that had zombies working together with a collective intelligence, I knew I had to make it a top priority. So here we are.

In a standard zombie movie premise, a group of people end up trapped in a building when a major outbreak of zombie-ism occurs. That's just about the only thing this has in common with many other zombie movies though. Everything feels different from the very first moment, a scene in which a scientist (played by Koo Kyo-hwan) injects himself with a vaccine and calls the police to warn of a bio-terrorist attack that he's about to launch, and most viewers should be kept very happy by the way that this provides some expected zombie movie moments couched in something very atypical for the sub-genre.

Co-written by Sang-ho and Choi Gyu-seok, Colony is about as intelligent and enjoyably tense as you would want any horror movie to be. It's also full of some startlingly unusual imagery, especially when showing the zombie horde working together and making use of information that may have been processed without a full understanding of it. There's a good selection of main characters to root for, some being much more capable than others, and Kyo-hwan is excellent as the amoral "patient zero".

Jun Ji-hyun is very good as someone who quickly turns into the lead character. Although I wasn't familiar with her before seeing this, she does well enough to make me want to check out more of her filmography. Ji Chang-wook and Kim Shin-rok work very well as a brother and sister team, the latter being further disadvantaged by mobility issues that make things even trickier when speed and stealth become essential. Others also do good work, whether they look likely to live or die, but the other main character worth mentioning here is played by Shin Hyun-been, acting as a biotechnologist looking on, and trying to advise, from the relative safety of her position outwith the zone of infection.

Every time we think that there's no way to reinvigorate the zombie movie sub-genre someone manages to come along and do just that. Yeon Sang-ho has managed it at least twice now, maybe more than that if you've been won over by the other instalments in what we'll call "the Busan trilogy". I hope he does it again. Failing that, I'd absolutely love to see another film set within this world, and perhaps further developing some of the rules put in place here.

9/10

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