Director Yeon Sang-ho’s “Colony” takes a familiar zombie movie setup and gives it a wonderfully creepy upgrade. When a fast mutating virus erupts during a biotech conference in a Seoul skyscraper, authorities lock down the building. The survivors find themselves trapped with an infected population that isn’t just violent, but one that’s learning and becoming more intelligent at an alarming pace.
That hive mind idea is easily the film’s best invention. These creatures can share knowledge, mimic human voices and adapt their hunting strategies almost instantly, turning what might have been another run-of-the-mill outbreak movie into one that’s much more unsettling. They aren’t simply chasing people, but they’re figuring them out.
The movie also has some clever ideas that are fully realized. The infected function as an obvious metaphor for generative AI and the herd mentality of social media, where information spreads at frightening speed and collective behavior can overwhelm individual thought. The film’s argument that connectivity can make us smarter while simultaneously stripping away empathy is hardly subtle, but it’s relevant. The film works best when it lets that idea creep into the horror rather than spelling everything out.
And there are some terrific horror set pieces. A sequence involving infected monkeys in a laboratory is pure nightmare fuel, the kind of scene that makes you immediately wonder why anyone would ever want to work in a biotech facility. The contortionist movement of the infected is equally disturbing, giving the creatures an eerie physicality that separates them from standard movie zombies.
The pacing is a little inconsistent, and the story can be intensely gripping one minute and surprisingly slow the next. The repetition will wear on you. The characters are another weak spot, because too many of them feel like one-dimensional archetypes who exist primarily to become infected, killed or sacrificed to move the story along. It’s difficult to become fully invested in the human drama when the movie doesn’t give everyone much personality.
Still, the central concept is strong enough to carry a lot of that. The setting is wonderfully claustrophobic, the action is genuinely pulse-pounding, and the threat keeps evolving in ways that make it difficult to settle into a predictable rhythm. Even when the movie repeats itself, I remained curious about what the infected would learn to do next.
“Colony” may not reinvent the zombie genre, but it gives it a clever contemporary twist. The blood and body horror is an accessory to a movie about technology, connection and the frightening possibility that becoming more connected doesn’t necessarily make us more human. In a world already obsessed with AI and social media groupthink, that’s a pretty good nightmare to tap into.
By: Louisa Moore
