Colony
Zombie apocalypse meets biotech abominations in Yeon Sang-ho’s Colony, an ambitious hive-mind zombie horror for the AI era
Die Hard and Dawn of the Dead – Zack Snyder’s remake rather than Romero’s OG, sadly – spring to mind as a Seoul shopping tower becomes the theatre of a bioterror attack in Train to Busan director Yeon Sang-ho’s relentless zombie film, Colony. Biology professor Kwon Se-jong (Gianna Jun) is attending a biotech conference, unaware that disgruntled biotech employee Seo Young-chul (Koo Kyo-hwan) is about to inject his ex-boss with a mutated slime mould that turns people into feral undead – but not just any.
Like ant colonies, Seo’s infected can exchange information to adjust and evolve, making them some of the smartest zombies to have ever graced the big screen. Seo insists he’s the only one who can stop the outbreak, but Professor Kwon rallies survivors to play the bioterrorist at his own game. Colony also acts as a not-so-subtle allegory for unregulated technology: the undead operate using swarm intelligence, a theory of complex behaviours occurring among decentralised animal organisms that has been applied to train AIs.
Seo’s supposedly perfect communication model fears chaos and conflict, which is why the human’s friction and unique flaws may inadvertently become their biggest assets. Colony may be light on character study, but its rejection of AI's inevitability offers food for thought without compromising on brutal flesh-tearing. A lot has changed in the ten years since Busan, but Yeon’s latest offering proves that zombie flicks, too, can adapt to stay relevant. Whether this one will be remembered in a decade, that’s another story.
Released 28 Aug by StudioCanal; certificate 15