Director – Yeon Sang-ho – 2026 – South Korea – Cert. 15 – 123m
*****
A scientist wreaks revenge on his former corporation in a bioterrorist attack which turns its victims into zombies – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 28th
Inside the Doongwoori building, CEO of the Chains Bio corporation Kang Woo-chul (Kim Jong Tae) gives a speech about mass communication via networks. Her ex-husband Professor Han Kyu-seong (Go Soo) urges Professor Kwon Se-jeong (Gianna Jun) to speak to CEO Kang following his speech, but Kang is called away for a phone call regarding one Suh Young-chul and a possible bioterrorist attack.
Encouraged to find Kang and leave her card, Kwon witnesses him assault another man behind the frosted glass walls of his office. That other man is the aforementioned Suh Young-chul (Koo Kyo-hwan), who fights back, injecting Kang with a serum which makes him vomit, writhe and turn into a zombie. Pretty soon, Kang is biting others, giving rise to a local zombie outbreak.
Despite witnessing the initial stages of the assault, Kwon is unaware of the injection and everything that follows, stopping at a cafe with her ex to quiz him as to why he left her. He liked the way she always pushed for what she wanted, never backing down, but in the end it was something he couldn’t handle. His new wife, viewed on the other end of a mobile video call, is Professor Gong Sul-hee (Shin Hyun-been), who we will later learn is another female scientist in a similar discipline.
Before they can leave the building, they are caught up in the attack and pursued by zombies, who as in director Yeon’s Train to Busan (2016) and Peninsular (2020) move at great speed and are performed by the extras concerned with engrossing and totally compelling body movements. Think Sadako from Ring (Hideo Nakata, 1998) without the hair, but a group or (later) a crowd of them.
Initially, these zombies run on all fours, but they possess a capacity to learn, and soon are running on two legs. In this film, Yeon pushed the boundaries of his zombie performers by employing trained dancers to deliver even more distinctive movements, and you can see and feel the difference on the screen.
Kwon and Han take refuge in a clothing store, with zombies slavering at the glass front. This is next to a café in which a small group of people, including a woman who constantly whines, who are likewise trapped. Wheelchair-bound Choi Hyun-hee (Kim Shin-rock) and her security guard / devoted brother carer Choi Hyun-seok (Ji Chang-wook) join with them, along with one or two others. With Kwon using the shop’s cardboard cut-outs of people fixed to the wheelchair as a decoy, Kwon’s ex bravely helps the café customers to cross the space between the two shop doors. The hesitation of the whiner leads to being bitten and zombified.
From there, it’s a game of cat and mouse, with Professor Gong an advisor to a task force run by the Minister of the Interior and Safety (Choi Kwang Il) trying to contain the situation from their control room. Suh, meanwhile, is revealed as not only the source of the outbreak but also the instigator of the periodic, evolutionary updates among the zombies. So our trapped party must take him prisoner and get him to the roof where a helicopter with SWAT people is waiting to airlift them.
Needless to say, it doesn’t work out quite like that. As with director Yeon’s earlier Train to Busan films, the level of invention in the script is high, with characters you care about. For instance, the zombies catch sight of the security guard carrying his sister on his back, and start similarly carrying each other. And they can be fooled (by use of perfume or antifreeze) into mistaking other scents for those of humans.
It’s essentially a Mad Scientist movie. Zombie cinema doesn’t usually delve into the narrative of how the zombies come to be, but this one puts that concern right at its heart. In this respect it resembles David Cronenberg‘s movies, where social breakdown results from an individual scientist tampering with the fabric of the created world in some form, and everything goes wrong as a result.
Director Yeon has a lot of fun with his mad scientist figure, at one point giving him a speech justifying himself and his dastardly blueprint for mankind that’s worthy of a Bond villain.
All this taking place in the ultra-conservative and sometime politically unstable country of South Korea, it also throws in plot elements about politicians prepared to sacrifice ordinary, honest folk for political expediency and the bigger picture. There are other, non-political characters prepared to sacrifice others for the sake of expediency, informing us, rather worryingly, that this ethic has insinuated itself into the social fabric of South Korea.
Tellingly, perhaps, many of the perpetrators of this ethic are men (although the characters include heroic males too) while the main heroes of the piece turn out to be female.
In short, this is a worthy successor to the director’s Train to Busan zombie movies, blackly comic in tone, and a heap of fun.
Colony is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, August 28th.
Trailer: