Ferocious, Terrifying, and a New Zombie Classic [Cannes Review]

Hard as it might be to believe, it’s been ten years since Yeon Sang-ho stunned the world—and resurrected an entire undead subgenre—with Train to Busan. Quentin Tarantino ranks it among his favorites of the century, and it’s entered the Romero canon as one of the best zombie movies ever made. Genre fans expected a surge of shambling corpses afterward, but save for some indie offerings (e.g., Virus-32, MadS), and the occasional legacy sequel, the big, theatrical revival never happened. 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.

Colony is Train to Busan by way of Resident Evil, Capcom’s celebrated and long-running horror multiverse. Kwon Se-jeong (Jun Ji-hyun) and her ex-husband, Han Gyu-seong (Go Soo), are in attendance for a Biotechnology conference hosted at the Doongwoori Building, a massive complex over 30 stories tall, encompassing event spaces and retail hubs in the heart of the city. Early exposition and previews of our forthcoming ragtag survivors across the high-rise—including security guard Choi Hyun-seok (Ji Chang-wook), his wheelchair-bound older sister, Choi Hyun-hee (Kim Shin-rok), and a trio of students— unravel quickly into chaos as a new virus spreads across the conference, turning those infected into the jittery, charging undead we love so much.

The mission-based structure is predicated on Koo Kyo-hwan’s Seo Young-cheol, the scientist responsible for the outbreak and the alleged vaccine (erm, MacGuffin). Presumably, if the survivors can capture Seo Young-cheol and deliver him to the rescue team, they’ll all be saved. There’s just an entire building full of erratic infected to deal with first.

Yeon Sang-ho expands the scale of Train to Busan without sacrificing its intimacy. A speeding train is supplanted by a massive skyscraper, each floor housing terrors unlike those seen before. The twist here, culling from the likes of The Last of Us, imbues the zombies with an ant-like neural communication network. They’re slimy and disgusting, coating themselves and their surroundings in a viscous mucus Kwon Se-jeong reasons allows them to communicate via a rudimentary hive-mind. It’s more than just the pantomime of something different, too, since Kwon Se-jeong (who also wrote the script) evolves his ungainly infected throughout. At first, they’re volatile and on all fours. As the mission develops, they’re listening, speaking, and coordinating attacks.

At its weakest, Colony broadly gestures toward a broader point rooted in contemporary anxieties—surveillance, lockdowns, groupthink, and misinformation—but these communicative monsters are really just parallels for systemic incompetence at best, malice at worst. Korean genre cinema is historically unflinching in its portrayal of the powers that be, and for all the posturing otherwise, Colony really only has one idea on its mind—the government and mega corporations don’t care if you live or die.

It’s not an earth-shattering revelation, but with action this kinetic, it doesn’t necessarily need to be. While Train to Busan’s intimacy is jeopardized with an expanded cast and larger playing field, Yeon Sang-ho has fine-tuned his craftsmanship. Pacing is exceptional, and across the two-hour runtime, it’s non-stop and electric. The undead are unforgiving in their savagery, knocking off would-be survivors with ease, tearing them limb from limb, with pathos defined enough to make those deaths hurt. Ji Chang-wook is a particular standout, clearly the audience’s entry point, deftly balancing his concern for his sister with an unspoken awareness of how far he’ll need to go to stay alive.

And he’ll go pretty far. Colony ups the ante regularly, piling on more and more until Colony is Resident Evil, Train to Busan, Tower, Hellbound (Yeon Sang-ho’s Netflix series), and Parasyte (ditto) all at once. I’m talking killer monkeys, monologuing villains, shifting alliances, and dexterous Lego zombies not unlike Smile 2’s most famous scare. For some, the sheer amount of movement might be indicative of shifting sensibilities and the need for something to always be happening, lest an audience lose interest and start playing Subway Surfers while zombies gorge on a wannabe hero.

Yeon Sang-ho is too talented for that vein of cynicism, however, and really, Colony emerges more as a magnum opus, not unlike Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. He is a modern maestro of the undead, and Colony is years of experience culminating in the ultimate zombie experience. While it might be thematically light, it’s technically and viscerally vicious. A loud, rip-roaring theatrical experience that will have you mourning the decay of the zombie subgenre. In other words, Colony is pretty damn infectious.

Tags: Colony Featured Pos Train to Busan Yeon Sang-Ho

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