Third verse, same as the first. Yeon Sang-ho’s 2016 rage-zombie opus Train to Busan was a breakout it, largely because of its relentless pace and technical virtuosity in staging a monster assault on a moving passenger train. Eat your heart out, Jaume Collett-Serra. That was followed in 2020 with a direct sequel, Peninsula, which was more of a post-apocalyptic work, one that frankly felt a bit microwaved in light of the endless Walking Dead spinoffs that were — and still are — proliferating the culture. Now we have Colony, which, while not technically related to the previous movies, shares enough of their raw DNA to be considered a virtual third iteration, for good and for ill.
Unemployed academic Kwon Se-jeong (Jun Ji-hyun) is at a bioengineering trade conference hosted by a big firm, whose CEO (Kim Jong-tae) gives an impressive presentation about slime molds and how they interact. Before she can cajole him into offering her a job, he gets injected with a mysterious compound by disgruntled employee Seo (Koo Kyo-hwan), which instantly turns him into a foam-puking, bug-eyed rage monster who turns anyone he bites. It’s not long before Kwon is trapped along with your standard crop of survivor archetypes in the building, which is now teeming with zombies.
Returning to a more grounded scenario and relatively confined space after Peninsula has done Yeon some good visually, but Colony’s broad characters and basic premise are pretty boilerplate this time around — you’ve seen almost everything here before. But where the film does generate some real fun is in its single new twist on the zombie formula: the living dead here have a hive mind, and they can be controlled by Seo. The only way to stop them (potentially) is to take him out before he can manage to find a way to unleash his creations on the world outside the building, which has been locked down by the authorities, and plenty of gnarly fun and mayhem follow the characters’ attempts to solve this problem.
Colony’s set pieces expand outward from this initial reveal, bringing both genuinely unsettling moments (like a group of zombies mirroring the physical movements of the survivors they’re stalking) and elated, exciting shocks as the characters figure out new ways to use the creatures’ hive mind against them and their controller. Importantly, Yeon also gets a lot of mileage out of his set, which his camera hurtles through with appealing fluidity, and which gradually becomes entirely covered in monster puke, as do the actors — it’s all amusingly gross. So while the character beats and narrative trajectory in Colony never move in directions you aren’t ready for and little about the film’s guiding framework proves all that compelling, the execution of the central gimmick helps the film transcend its baseline familiarity and manage to still seem relatively fresh. That’s no small feat in our present zombie-rich entertainment landscape.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2026 — Dispatch 2.
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