‘Colony’ Review: A Seoul Skyscraper Becomes a Vertical Nightmare in Yeon Sang-ho’s Return to the Undead
‘Colony‘ drops audiences inside a gleaming high rise during a biotech conference, and within minutes that polished lobby turns into a sealed tomb. Director Yeon Sang-ho, the filmmaker behind ‘Train to Busan,’ spends his first act building dread through surveillance cameras, locked stairwells, and the slow creeping panic of people realizing the building will not let them leave. Jun Ji-hyun plays Kwon Se-jeong, a scientist whose expertise becomes the group’s only real advantage once the infected start evolving in ways nobody in the building expected.
The premise plants Se-jeong alongside her ex-husband, played by Go Soo, and a handful of strangers including characters portrayed by Koo Kyo-hwan, Ji Chang-wook, Kim Shin-rok, and Shin Hyun-been. Watching this ensemble get sorted into leaders, cowards, and casualties gives the film its early pulse, and there is a genuine thrill in seeing genre stalwarts get thrown into a structure this vertical and this claustrophobic.
Once the outbreak fully takes hold, ‘Colony’ finds its clearest identity as a piece of pure physical filmmaking. The infected here do not just run, they contort, coat surfaces in a slick mucus, and appear to communicate with something resembling a shared nervous system, which gives the back half of the movie a genuinely unsettling texture I have not seen in this genre for a while. Every corridor becomes its own miniature siege, and the choreography of bodies crashing through glass and stairwells has a nasty, tactile energy that had me leaning forward more than once.
Where the film stumbles is in its ambition to say something bigger. Se-jeong keeps circling back to lab footage and biotech jargon meant to explain the origin of the virus, and every time the plot detours into that investigation, the momentum I just described grinds down to a near halt. I understand the instinct to wrap a monster movie around ideas about surveillance, corporate recklessness, and how quickly a controlled environment turns authoritarian, but the film states these themes rather than earning them, and the dialogue scenes carrying that weight often feel like homework wedged between the carnage.
The cast does what it can with characters that are sketched rather than developed. Jun Ji-hyun anchors the film with a steely, exhausted physicality that sells her character’s competence even when the script gives her clunky exposition to deliver, and Koo Kyo-hwan brings a jittery humanity to a role that could have been a one note comic relief. I wanted more time simply watching these people react to each other instead of watching them explain the plot to each other.
Visually, this is clearly the work of a director who has grown more confident with scale since his last outing in this genre. Cinematographer Byun Bong-sun uses the building’s mix of glass atriums and cramped service tunnels to constantly reset the geography of danger, so the audience never quite settles into a rhythm, which is exactly the kind of restlessness a siege movie should provoke. The back third in particular unleashes some of the most inventive practical carnage I have watched in a horror release this year.
‘Colony’ never becomes the instant classic its premiere slot and pedigree seemed to promise, but it also never stops being a functional, occasionally thrilling piece of genre craft. I walked away wishing the film trusted its audience enough to feel its ideas about isolation and control rather than narrating them, because the raw filmmaking on display deserved sharper writing around it. Weighing the flashes of genuine horror craft against the sluggish detours into exposition, I am landing on 7 out of 10, a solid genre outing that entertains far more often than it frustrates.
How did you like 'Colony'?
Have you seen ‘Colony’ yet, and did the building’s descent into chaos work for you the way it did for me? Share your verdict in the comments below.
