From director Yeon Sang-ho, who previously gave us the excellent Train to Busan before veering into the middling territory of Peninsula, Colony emerges as an action-packed horror film that amps up the stakes while containing the chaos inside a high-rise building complex in downtown Seoul to maintain an intimate and intense narrative. By confining the humans inside one location, it often takes the tone and mode of a horror/thriller until the story pushes it towards more action-oriented fare. While the storytelling remains clear, its emotional core is relegated to the supporting characters rather than the protagonist. Nevertheless, Colony is a fun, exciting movie to watch in the cinema as Yeon Sang-ho knows how to utilize the big screen for maximum visceral impact.
Colony centers on a group of people who get trapped within a commercial complex, encompassing a shopping mall, corporate offices, and a convention hall, after a man-made outbreak transforms the population into hyper-aggressive zombie horde operating under a singular hive-mind.
Jun Ji-hyun (credited as Gianna Jun, which is her international name) leads the cast as Kwon Se-jeong. a brilliant, tough, and demanding biotech professor who arrives at the building to attend the Chain Bio Conference with her ex-husband, Han Gyu-seong (Go Soo).
While trying to get a job interview with the Chains Bio CEO, Se-jeong witnesses a confrontation between the executive and Suh Yeong-cheol (Koo Kyo-hwan), a disgraced former Chains Bio scientist who was fired because his research had deadly consequences that threatened the fate of humanity’s future.
Determined to take revenge and prove his research would not only improve the human race but help him exact his revenge on everyone who had wronged him. Yeong-cheol injects both himself and the CEO with a bio-weapon virus, now a zombie, unleashing a localized patient zero, an infects other who rapidly turns the entire complex into a claustrophobic house of horrors.
The building perimeter is quickly sealed off as the attacks intensify and trapping a small cluster of survivors within the building. Among them are the complex’s security officer, Choi Hyun-seok (Ji Chang-wook), his sister Choi Hyun-hee (Kim Shin-rok), who needs a wheelchair to move, and a few other desperate civilians.
Trapped in the building, without any exit strategy, the survivors is forced to navigate through the maze-like building, executing tense evasion tactics to bypass a rapidly multiplying, hive-minded horde to avoid detection if they want to make it out alive.
The structural set up is very clear and precise. Yeon Sang-ho, co-writing alongside Choi Gyu-seok, injects a new twist into the zombie genre by adding elements of biotech elements into the mix. Rather than acting on standard rabid instinct, these zombies are patterned from certain parasitic fungus and ants colonies. They communicate with each other and exchange information through pheromones.
Consequently, any intelligence and information gained by a single zombie is shared with another. Se-jeong must use her intellect to try and outsmart the hive-mind horde to find a cure or find an escape route before they all succumb.
Much like Train to Busan, Yeong Sang-ho fills the surviving party with the familiar genre archetypes – the law enforcer, teenagers (including bullies and the bullied), the vulnerable older person, and a rich man who thinks his wealth dictates the value of his life.
And among them is the everyman, in the form of Ji Chang-wook, who actually works as an everyman despite his good looks – but he plays against type and creates new and refreshing dimensions with these characters. Some people are not what they seem and they play out in the survival aspect of the movie in unpredictable ways.
But make no mistake: this is entirely Jun Ji-hyun’s movie. The camera and the world revolve around her, leaving Ji Chang-wook to merely playing support. Yet, it provides the film with a much-needed emotional core with Ji Chang-wook’s relationship with his sister, played by Kim Shin-rok, who is always excellent in anything she does. As a person with physical disability, Kim Shin-rok’s Choi Hyun-hee is initially framed as a liability, however, a beautifully planted character trait completely shifts the narrative landscape later on. It’s their sibling bond that lends the film its genuine heart, but it is ultimately Jun Ji-hyun’s presence as Se-jeong that gives the film forward momentum.
Both Jun Ji-hyun and Koo Kyo-hwan make for strong lead characters – the protagonist and the antagonist – in roles they have mastered in their many dramas and films before this. These characters are types they’ve played before, but it is so fun watching them do it.
Ultimately, Colony is a tight, exceptionally fast-paced, and action-packed ride. It makes full use on the claustrophobic setting to create an exciting cat-and-mouse thriller, that surprises with some twists in the second and third acts that ensure the story remains unpredictable and refreshing. It has dynamic, sweeping camera movements that keeps the action scenes breathlessly kinetic and heart-pounding while the choreography of the zombie horde is distinct and frightening from start to finish.
My Rating: 4.5 Stars
Don’t miss the claustrophobic terror and relentless thrills of Colony. Gather your friends, buy your tickets, and experience the hive-mind horror on the biggest screen possible. Now playing in cinemas nationwide! Check your local theater listings for showtimes.
