Colony review
By Joel Humphries · Watched 08.31.26
★★★½ 3.5 / 5
Spoiler-free review
Yeon Sang-ho returns to South Korean zombie territory with fast, increasingly coordinated creatures and the kind of polished action and choreography the genre reliably delivers. Colony works whenever people are running for their lives, and a brother-sister relationship supplies its strongest emotional material. What it lacks is the character depth and intelligence that made Train to Busan more than an expertly assembled zombie movie. This is good, energetic genre filmmaking rather than another classic—an easy recommendation for zombie fans who keep their expectations there.
Full review — contains spoilers
This is another entry in what has become a pretty consistent genre of South Korean horror movies, specifically South Korean zombie movies.
Obviously, everybody is going to compare these things to Train to Busan at some point, and this one has an even more direct connection because Yeon Sang-ho directed both. But this is trying to pick up some of that Train to Busan energy without really having the intellect or character work that made Train to Busan so good.
This is a zombie movie. They’re fast zombies, which is already my preferred kind of zombie. These zombies can also learn and coordinate their behavior, so that gives the movie a little something extra to work with. If the humans figure out how to defend themselves one way, the zombies can start figuring out how to deal with that.
That’s fun.
But there’s really not much more to the movie than it being another zombie movie.
South Korean films tend to be competently shot and well choreographed, and this is no exception. The action looks good. The zombies look good. When people are running around trying not to get eaten, everything works the way it’s supposed to work.
The characters are just not very deep. They’re mostly playing different familiar tropes. You’ve got your evil scientist, your conflicted scientist, your corporate people, your people losing family members, your people making sacrifices. They hit the emotional beats that you’d expect them to hit without really doing a lot more with the characters.
There’s a brother and sister pair here who probably have the strongest emotional material in the movie. That’s the one relationship that might actually pull a tear or two out of you by the time this thing is over.
Other than that, it’s just competently done.
And I don’t mean that as an insult. It’s perfectly fine.
If you’re expecting greatness out of this, you’re not getting greatness. If you’re expecting goodness, there’s plenty of goodness here. It’s well shot, well choreographed, the zombies are fun, and it moves along.
If you like zombie movies, I recommend it. Just don’t go into it expecting another Train to Busan.