Final Rating: 3/5
Zombies with a hivemind take over a Seoul shopping mall in Colony. Director Yeon Sang-ho’s horror film boasts impressive effects and memorable characters but suffers from confusing messaging and a story a bit too similar to the director’s previous film Train to Busan.
Colony opens with biotech CEO Kang Woo-chul (Kim Jong Tae) at a conference giving a speech about collective intelligence, which is used by slime molds, ants, and other animals to enable “perfect communication.” Harnessing collective intelligence could have incredible benefits for disease prevention and cell regeneration in humans, Kang posits, by enabling cells to communicate across bodies.
Kang soon gets the opportunity to test his theory when he is injected with an experimental virus by spurned former employee turned bioterrorist Seo Young-cheol (Koo Kyo-hwan). With Kang as patient zero, the virus quickly spreads, turning almost everyone in the mall hosting the conference into zombies hell bent on eating any remaining uninfected humans. The twist is that these zombies share a hivemind, learning and evolving as a group to become more effective at hunting their prey.
The prey in question are a ragtag band of survivors trapped on the first floor when the mall is quarantined. The group of disparate mall patrons is led by Kwon Se-jeong (Jun Ji-hyun), a biologist who also studied collective intelligence. Jun has great chemistry with Koo’s terrorist Seo, once the group meets up with him. The shared history with biotechnology, as well as their differing opinions on how and whether concepts like shared intelligence can be harnessed by humans regularly put the two at opposite ends of the film’s headier dialogues.
As leader of the group, Kwon also ends up as the point person for the military scientists and liaisons calling in from outside the mall, which leads to some great character moments alongside Gong Seol-hee (Shin Hyun-been), a fellow biologist and also Kwon’s ex-husband’s new wife.
The relationships and motivations of the rest of the cast tug at the cohesion of the group. One girl is a social outcast forced to buddy up with her high school bully. Another group member is a mall security guard looking after his wheelchair-bound sister.
Whereas the zombies are a hivemind of sorts, the survivors decidedly are not. Under Jun’s leadership, they’re usually able to work together, but their individuality inevitably dooms them all. Each death in the film is the direct result of someone’s self-interest, ironically condemning them to join a collective without a self. Colony comments on the conflict between collectivism and individualism; the collective the unambiguous antagonist, but individuals equally to blame for their own demise.
Eventually, that conflict equates collectivism with authoritarianism, introducing a means through which the collective can be controlled by a single leader. While the zombie hivemind is never portrayed as a “good thing,” the introduction of a charismatic leader pulling the strings deepens the horror by playing into real-world anti-communist messaging. Director Yeong’s previous film Train to Busan, invoked the Korean War through zombies invading South Korea save for Busan (one of the only locations not invaded by North Korea during the war). Colony similarly plays to the fear of an invaded Seoul, but makes that threat internal.
The zombies aren’t attacking Seoul from outside, they’re homegrown. And yet, the zombies represent an alien way of life, one from which there’s no return. Once infected by a literal mind-virus, they’re forced to do the bidding of their puppetmaster, who seeks only to further spread this new and horrific way of life.
In the end, Colony’s social commentary is effectively communicated, but not especially incisive. If anything, director Yeong’s outlook feels bleak considering how totally the zombies cease to exist as people, and how ineffective the survivors ultimately are at stopping that from happening. Then again, Colony is an action-horror movie first and foremost, and to that end, it’s pretty good.
Colony was seen during 2026 Fantasia Festival. Thank you to the Well Go USA for the screener.
