Some filmmakers thrive on repetition. Paul Schrader, for one, keeps finding new depths of despair while probing the psyches of lonely men. By contrast, the similarities between Yeon Sang-ho’s zombie film Colony and his breakout global hit Train to Busan often serve to highlight the former’s weaknesses. But as he doubles down on his knack for practical effects and mounting propulsive set pieces within constricted environments, he offers enough tweaks to a familiar formula to make the whole thing feel worthwhile.
Colony essentially approaches Train to Busan’s setup from a 90-degree angle, trapping a group of strangers inside a towering, zombie-infested building. The film begins with out-of-work academic Kwon Se-jeong (Jun Ji-hyun) attending a presentation from a bioengineering company. She’s impressed by the company’s CEO, Kang Woo-chul (Kim Jong-Tae), and his speech about the powers of slime mold and tries to corner him after the event in the hopes of talking her way into a job. Unfortunately, she’s beaten to the punch by Seo Young-chul (Koo Kyo-hwan), a disgruntled former employee of Kang’s who confronts his old boss and stabs him with a needle full of a zombifying virus that soon spreads across the building.
The rest of the film follows Kwon and her fellow survivors as they attempt to make it out of the building alive. Every one of them feels like a photocopy of a photocopy, less sharply defined than their counterparts in Train to Busan. Kwon is the antisocial protagonist who does things that make everyone hate her, and Hwang Jae-yeol plays a bellicose rich guy who, shocker, turns out not to be entirely trustworthy. In place of a pregnant woman and her doting husband are wheelchair user Choi Hyun-hee (Kim Shin-rok) and her doting brother Choi Hyun-seok (Ji Chang-wook), though the Ma Dong-seok role here is equally filled by an older survivor (Kim Jae-rok) who defies presumptions about his age in one of the film’s slickest action sequences.
While Train to Busan traded in broad archetypes, the film also gave them clear and satisfying arcs to follow. Here, though Kwon and the older man have a spiky charm to them, few of the survivors really evolve over the course of the story. Most of them just hang around in the wings until it’s time for them to be bitten, and many of them are so vaguely defined that you’re liable to forget what their deal is entirely until they explicitly bring it up.
Fortunately, the film’s infected characters are much more memorable. The infected scramble around in a manner that’s convulsive and almost dancerly, but it’s in the specific workings of its zombies that Colony shows a real burst of imagination. The concept of a zombie horde linked by a hive mind could have been lifted from The Last of Us, but the focus on the “collective intelligence” aspect of the horde alters the mechanics of Colony’s humans-versus-zombies conflict in a distinctive way, while also adding a fresh subtext to a well-trod subgenre.
The infected’s shared mind allows them, with the aid of the immune Seo, to cooperate in an unsettling manner, clustering together and intertwining their limbs like a human rat king. Kwon and company soon learn to fight back by feeding the horde false information, using their perfectly harmonized mental life against them. Later, one of the survivors also purposefully misleads another to keep them out of danger, and the imperfect nature of human connection that Seo has been raging against is suddenly presented in a new, heroic light.
Colony’s “collective intelligence” angle is dramatically and thematically coherent, and the film is ideally designed to make the viewer part of the information gap, by letting us get caught up in the problems caused by imperfect communication. But it plays things oddly straight: The heroes come up with a plan, execute it pretty much the way they planned it, then rinse and repeat.
In one scene, the survivors escort Seo, who’s managed to plug himself into the zombie hive mind, out of a room that they’ve been hiding in while he draws the zombies after them, only for us to discover that this was a ruse. Our heroes have actually stayed put in their initial hiding place, opening and closing doors within earshot of Seo so he gets the wrong idea. It’s a neat trick played on both Seo and the viewer, but the film reveals the truth too soon. Such moments are emblematic of the ways in which Colony stops just short of capturing the gleefully sustained and heightened sense of suspense that made Train to Busan so electrifying.
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