‘Colony’: The Ultimate Zombie Experience

Yeon Sang-ho stunned the world in 2016. After a decade of nonstop undead carnage, critics and audiences had grown tired. Zombies were a massive cultural moment, but by the mid-2010s, their cache in the horror and genre zeitgeist dwindled considerably, and they invited more eyerolls than Zombi eye gouging. A decade later, the acclaimed filmmaker is back, and with Colony, Yeon Sang-ho delivers the ultimate zombie experience.

In my 4-star review of Colony, I wrote, “Yeon Sang-ho is trying his damnedest with Colony, a standalone zombie epic that nonetheless feels in conversation with Train to Busan and Peninsula (his maligned sequel). Colony is big, audacious, and like Train to Busan, the best zombie movie in years.” While this film isn’t directly tied to the larger Train to Busan universe, it nonetheless feels like an inevitable capstone a decade in the making. The emotional core, rabid infected, and stellar set-pieces remain, this time on a much larger scale. Think of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. If Train to Busan was Night, Colony is undoubtedly Yeon Sang-ho’sDawn.

That thematic link extends far beyond the shopping-mall setting, too. Like Romero’s classics, Colony operates on both a purely visceral, genre level and as a pointed critique of a society on the brink of collapse. The hive-mind implications of his newest infected aren’t just gnarly movie monsters (though they’re also, exceptionally that), but stark, damning reminders of a society that is increasingly less willing to think for themselves, eager instead to outsource AI or propaganda to do their thinking for them; “Watch this movie before Twitter tells you it’s bad.” We’ve all seen that.

The pure, sensational filmmaking augments Colony’s rapturous discourse. As a visual medium, filmmaking can’t just be a vessel for political ethos, and Yeon Sang-ho accomplishes his tightest, best work yet here. Accompanied by stirring score, delicately rotted aesthetics, and enviable choreographic work (these zombies movie in ways you’ve never seen before). It’s a nonstop, tremendously paced epic, the kind of zombie movie I thought we’d never get again. Ironic as it might seem, Yeon Sang-ho is keeping the undead alive and well.