Train to Busan director Yeon Sang-ho’s latest zombie thriller spotlights the terrifying strength of collective action
In the decade since Yeon Sang-ho’s international breakout Train to Busan, the Zombie genre has had several pop culture resurrections. Danny Boyle and Nia DaCosta’s revival of the 28…Later franchise in a searing indictment of post-Brexit politics and a sincere meditation on the nature of good and evil. At the same time, more standalone features like Les Affamés, The Cured, and #Alive channel the spirit of George Romero to interrogate the sliding scale of (in)humanity that the Zombie apocalypse–and various other global crises–threaten to bring out in all of us. As Yeon Sang-ho returns to the genre that brought him a global audience, especially in the wake of his disappointing follow-up, Peninsula, the question remains whether there’s any fresh ground left for one more legion of resurrecting corpses to rise from.
Yeon’s latest, Colony, proves there’s still plenty of frenzied life left in the genre. It patchworks tropes from everything between Dawn of the Dead and World War Z, but its hungry hive-mind horde unleashed in a South Korean high-rise makes for constantly engaging, downright thrilling summer blockbuster fare. Beyond its zombie trappings, Colony thrives as a successor to disaster epics like The Towering Inferno or The Poseidon Adventure, pitting its ragtag band of survivors against a mindless, unstoppable force of nature—and finding, amid the chaos, a deeper power in collaborative survival rather than corrupting self-interest.
A biotech conference in Seoul’s Dongwoori shopping and high-rise complex quickly turns bloody as a Pharma CEO is infected by vengeful ex-employee Young-chul (Koo Kyo-hwan) with an experimental pathogen. Those infected are solely compelled to bite, bleed, and barf on as many victims as possible–linking them to a pheromone-driven network which allows these Zombies to share sensory experiences in real time and collectively evolve into increasingly ruthless killers. As the building is sealed under quarantine, ostracized professor Se-jeong (Gianna Jun) must rally a small band of survivors to track down Young-chul—who’s inoculated himself with a possible cure—and stay alive long enough to stop the virus from breaking containment.
The loss of individual identity remains one of zombie cinema’s most terrifying tropes, as unique personalities are drained into a single mindless urge to feed. But few entries have married that theme with subsumption into a larger, ravenous horde. The Last of Us offers little insight into their decentralized, fungal network of creatures beyond surface-level scientific fascination, while World War Z flirts with this concept as their traditional mob of ghouls occasionally takes on tsunami-like crushing power. Colony is one of the first films I can recall to take this hive mentality idea seriously, using concepts of mold-based swarm intelligence to turn these monsters into a massive, visceral force to be repeatedly reckoned with. When one learns, they all learn—so the living characters must recurrently think on their feet as momentary strengths threaten to become weaknesses in an instant. Where other Zombie films feel more iterative in their confrontations, confusing rising stakes with a larger and larger body count, the set pieces of Colony deal with a terrifying mind-linked antagonist whose knowledge and instincts grow alongside its physical numbers.
Yeon’s pulse-pounding action sequences carry the visual flair and editorial precision that define his horror work, here staged as a cat-and-mouse game of expectations with the audience. There’s plenty of gut-churning gore spilled across the sleek floors of this shopping center, but the truly inventive thrill lies in when such madness stops as the creatures stare into the heavens in unison to absorb some new, advantageous survival tactic. With nail-biting dread, we anticipate alongside the characters just what the hive-mind horde has figured out about their latest plan, and what new dangers now await. Our characters aren’t engaged in repetitive scenes of zombie fleeing or destruction–both the characters we root for and the creatures they clash with must constantly come up with new strategies that play on what little they know about each other–from using mall mannequins to masking scents with perfume and antifreeze. While Colony may be built on tried-and-true zombie tropes, this relentlessly evolving threat lets Yeon and co-writer Choi Gyu-seok subvert those expectations as often as they lean into them.
What aids Yeon isn’t how much he leans into Zombie mayhem, but the equally evolving nature of Colony’s group protagonist. Survivor ensembles have been part of Zombie films since as far back as Night of the Living Dead, where competing priorities for survival cultivate atmospheric paranoia that allows buried tensions of class, race, and beyond to claw their way to the surface. Yet the way Yeon and Choi deploy these tensions feels less indebted to their genre forebears than Irwin Allen’s all-star disaster epics like The Poseidon Adventure or The Towering Inferno. Sure, most of the supporting cast—including a blustery salaryman, a noble elderly former athlete, or a meek, wealthy schoolgirl bullied by her punkish seniors—are sketched only as far as their occupations or stock traits allow them to survive to the next set piece. But our familiarity with the types acts as effective narrative shorthand for Yeon and Choi to keep the film’s action breathtakingly propulsive, finding fresh ways to bounce these familiar characters off each other in tense, life-threatening situations. With less emphasis placed on dispatching the Zombie threat than on outwitting or outlasting it, Colony is more interested in these characters’ minds than their muscle. Our time with them centers on how well they solve problems together—how to stretch limited resources to climb a level, or save as many lives as possible, all while navigating the high-rise undetected.
This may harken back to similar beats as Yeon’s earlier Train to Busan, but there’s such a welcome emphasis on the power of united teamwork here rather than recurring beats of self-sacrifice or tragedy. This eye for shared character development is where Colony works best, especially as selfish survival instincts grow to wreak as much havoc as the widespread carnage of the zombie masses. No one embodies this in the cast more than Koo’s manipulative Young-Chul, who weaponizes his ability to read the zombies as fluently as his living captors–forcing the group to confront the limits of their own shared trust. As distrust foments into revenge plots and heads down other melodramatic avenues, the group’s petty betrayals remain an effective foil to Yeon’s mindless yet coordinated undead mob—celebrating the best of what individual strengths can achieve toward a common good, while condemning self-interest as just as poisonous to those efforts as blind mob mentality.
While some may dismiss Colony as a familiar rehashing of horror tropes that refuse to stay buried, it’s Yeon Sang-ho’s refreshing emphasis on collective action among the dead as much as the living that makes his latest Zombie thriller such an exhilarating popcorn adventure.
Colony had its Canadian premiere at Fantasia 2026. The film opens in US theaters on August 28, 2026 courtesy of Well Go USA.
