NYAFF 2026 Review: Colony

Director Yeon Sang-ho took the world by storm in 2016 with the release of Train to Busan. A genuinely inventive and thrilling zombie flick, part of the charm with the film was its rather basic setup allowed for stronger human drama to come out during its scenarios. It was also incredibly economical, keeping things locked to a (mostly) single setting and working within those confines to highlight and subvert the tropes of zombie fiction that had become old-hat over the decades.

Sang-ho would attempt to spin that film off in different directions, including an animated prequel and side story, but has otherwise stayed away from zombie fiction for the better part of a decade. I’m not sure if constant requests for a “proper” sequel spurred the creation of Colony, but I’m happy Sang-ho didn’t opt to make this as an extended arm of Train to Busan. Colony, rather, is its own thing.

For the most part, too, it works. It maybe has less drama than you’d expect from a zombie flick, but the creative concept at its core is rife with opportunities for transforming zombie cinema.

Colony
Director: Yeon Sang-ho
Release Date: May 21, 2026 (South Korea), July 10, 2026 (NYAFF)
Country: South Korea

I went into Colony mostly blind as I hadn’t been following news of its production over the years. Only knowing it came from the director of Train to Busan, I wasn’t too shocked that he decided to create another spin on zombie action films. Only just last year did I finally see Train, which remains an emotional gut punch despite a decade of imitators and riffs. Using a template not dissimilar to Game of Death or Die Hard was a brilliant move for a zombie film, though I suppose one could point to Dawn of the Dead as the progenitor of “trapped in” zombie films.

Anyway, where Train to Busan could be labeled as a minimalist zombie film, Colony goes for the opposite approach. Not quite maximalist, the scale is larger, and the threat feels decidedly more modern. The film begins when a biologist named Seo Young-cheol (Koo Kyo-hwan) makes a call to the police to claim he’ll be committing an act of terrorism at Dongwoori Building in mere hours. Injecting himself with a vaccine, he heads off to start his night of terror.

What is going on at the Dongwoori Building that night? Fictional company Chains Bio is holding a presentation for a radical new medicine that can lead to regenerative capabilities in patients. CEO Kang Woo-chul (Kim Jong-tae) gives a rousing speech about how it will change the course of human history, which should start adding some dots together in terms of story. While this is going on, currently unemployed professor Kwon Se-jeong (Gianna Jun) is in the audience with her ex-husband trying to decipher who sent her an invitation to this conference and what they might want with her.

To cut the recap short, Yong-cheol eventually confronts Woo-chul and injects him with the strand of his zombie virus as a form of protest for Chains Bio stealing his ideas. It then kicks off an outbreak that gets contained to the building, but has a pretty deadly twist: these zombies work like a colony of ants by utilizing collective learning to evolve in near real-time. There’s a reason for that, but it comes into spoiler territory.

On sheer concept alone, I think Colony is a great take on the zombie apocalypse film. Playing into the global fears that COVID-19 left in its wake, it’s scary as hell to think that zombies are not only relatively fast and strong, but can eventually become the next stage in human evolution. Right after the initial outbreak, the film moves at a relentless pace through a couple of set-piece moments that wouldn’t be out of place in a Dead Rising or Resident Evil game. We see the survivors get trapped between two points in a shopping center having to work together to figure out how these creatures interact with the world and how to subvert that. It then goes from bad to worse when Se-jeong notices that the zombies are actually learning through not only imitation, but the mold spores spread across the walls.

Taken on a pure action level, Colony delivers. There’s this outstanding moment where two of the zombies grab another and throw them down the hallway that got me amped up. I also appreciate that the film avoids dipping into clichés as its characters tend to not act purposely stupid for the sake of a death. When the first survivor gets killed, it genuinely feels as if there was no other outcome that could have happened.

It's really at the mid-point where Colony starts to lose some of its steam. I can understand why the characters aren’t initially given much backstory, but in the down moments where chatter and exposition should fill in some of the gaps, Colony opts to laser focus on explaining how the outbreak works. It certainly is interesting, not to mention has moments which pay off later down the line, but it’s not exactly riveting to listen to. There’s a decided lack of drama between the characters, with only one cop eventually going rogue (big surprise) and acting in self-interest.

Where I agree with Korean audiences is that Colony kind of disobeys its own rules when it has Yong-cheol start to control the zombies through the same collective learning. I fully understand the development, and even get that Sang-ho is maybe commenting on how modern methods of communication are strangling genuine human impact, but when you have a character acting like a DM from Dungeons and Dragons with zombies, it stops being a film about survival and drifts into superhero territory. I’m not sure what anyone would do in a situation like that, but the finale of the film has to scramble to introduce so many new counters to this threat that it feels like Sang-ho kind of wrote himself into a corner.

Now, I don’t think it derails Colony from an entertainment aspect, but it robs it of the stronger emotional core that Train to Busan had. I’m doing my best not to compare the two films, but one thought that came to me when the credits were rolling kind of sums up the comparison between each movie. Colony is a “smarter” film than Train to Busan, but Train to Busan is a much more emotional one. To invoke the legendary John Carpenter for a moment, the reason the Halloween franchise has stuck around for so long is that you cannot explain Michael Myers. You can give him a different backstory or even show him with weaknesses, but there is no true reason for his actions. He’s just evil.

That’s why Train to Busan works so well. We don’t truly understand where the zombies came from or what the end goal is, so the film shifts from being an information dump to a purely human-driven drama. That level of intimacy was missing from the zombie genre for years, even if you could point to other zombie films that made a dramatic impact (such as 28 Days Later). Colony, conversely, wants you to draw all these fairly accurate parallels to swarm intelligence, but forgets that it has characters fighting against the threat. When any emotion does enter the picture, it’s fairly basic stuff like two girls arguing over high school bullying. Anyone can relate, but it’s not particularly deep.

The saddest casualty is the story between Choi Hyun-seok (Ji Chang-wook) and Choi Hyun-hee (Shin Hyun-been). Hyun-seok is a security guard working at Doongwoori who gets a visit from his sister, Hyun-hee. Hyun-hee is an IT employee on break, but happens to be confined to a wheelchair. Her disability creates some shocking tension in the beginning outbreak, but their plight starts to become more personal as the film moves along. It’s the only real drama the film ever gets, but it gets cut short by a predictable conclusion.

Even so, I can’t fault everyone for giving it their all. Gianna Jun is stellar as the lead, getting a few moments that show her resourcefulness on the fly. I think Koo Kyo-hwan steals the entire film, though, as his villainess turn is absolutely despicable. He acts Young-cheol as such a deplorable human that you just want to punch the dude in the face. The supporting cast is overall solid, but they simply don’t have enough presence to really register beyond moment-to-moment segments.

That’s kind of where I’m at with Colony. I did really enjoy the film, but it was purely on a visceral level. Movies don’t need to be deep to be effective, which I know as a fan of action films, but zombie movies are well past the point of delivering straightforward thrills. Colony does exhibit a genuinely scary plot device that could make for some terrific spin-offs, but I think the shadow of Train to Busan is simply too wide for Yeon Sang-ho to ever escape. I’ll give him props for trying, and seeing as how this is more effective than either Train to Busan continuation, at least he’s learning from past mistakes (Kind of like the zombies in this film, ooooo!).