Colony

Everyone has had a bad day. You know, the kind when you’re driving to work and spill coffee all over your white shirt. You know what’s worse than that? Going to a conference in a building that suddenly becomes the site of a biological attack, unleashing a group of zombies who just want to make you one of them. A day like that makes spilled coffee look like a walk in the park. Now we just have to hope these people’s bad day is entertaining for us. Well, Yeon Sang-ho, who brought us the masterpiece Train to Busan, is at the controls, so it’s safe to say we might be in pretty good hands.

Currently unemployed, Kwon Se-jeong (Jun Ji-hyun), a biotechnology professor, is invited to a conference by her ex-husband. The hope is that the event might lead to a new job for Se-jeong, but the interview goes far worse than she could have imagined. It turns out a disgraced scientist named Seo Young-cheol (Koo Kyo-hwan) has plans of his own, and he arrives carrying a couple of syringes filled with something that is about to make everyone’s day at the conference go very, very badly.

Young-cheol is out for revenge, and he gets it when he injects the company’s CEO with what’s inside one of those syringes, turning him into a zombie-like creature with only one thing on his mind. What follows is a whole lot of biting and people turning, sending everyone running, including Se-jeong, who hides in a store with a small group of survivors.

During the chaos, Se-jeong notices something unusual. Their attackers appear to be working through a hive mind and adapting to their environment, making it easier for them to hunt their prey. The only solution might be to find Young-cheol, who could hold the cure—or maybe he’s something even worse.

Written by Choi Kyu-seok and Yeon Sang-ho, Colony comes flying out of the gate and tries to keep that pace throughout, only occasionally slowing down. Luckily, those dips aren’t too big and mostly give you a chance to catch your breath before the movie revs back up again. The problem with zombie movies is that we’ve seen so much already that it can be difficult to bring something truly new to the genre. Colony does bring some fresh ideas to the table, but there’s still a little bit of that “been there, done that” feeling you can’t quite shake, even while you’re enjoying what you’re watching.

Colony really sucks you in visually and is ambitious in what it’s trying to do, delivering one of the fresher-feeling zombie movies we’ve gotten in a while. As I said before, it does take some of the same turns that so many zombie movies do, but it’s the original elements that stand out and help elevate it above a lot of the competition.

Where Colony really works is with its group of survivors, who are clever at first as they learn the rules and adapt to what’s happening around them. Eventually, though, humans are gonna human, and you start rooting against pretty much everyone in the group who isn’t named Se-jeong.

Even with its flaws, Colony is really hard not to enjoy, as Yeon Sang-ho delivers another worthwhile contribution to the zombie genre. The weakest part is most of the human characters, but the zombies are where the movie shines. Add in some gripping action and horror, and you’ve got just what the doctor ordered.

Brian Taylor

Member of the North Texas Film Critics Association, and lover of all things Cinema