Colony (2026)
Official Synopsis
Professor Se-jeong finds herself trapped inside a biotech conference after a rapidly mutating virus is released and authorities seal the facility. With a small group of survivors, she must find a way out while the infected continue to change in increasingly disturbing ways.
William’s Review
I went into Colony with pretty high expectations. Yeon Sang-ho directed Train to Busan, which isn’t just one of my favorite zombie movies, it’s one of my favorite movies, period. Colony doesn’t hit me on that same emotional level, but I really liked how Sang-ho found a different way into the infected genre instead of trying to recreate what worked before.
The infected are easily the best part of the movie. They start off incredibly feral, moving around in these fast, almost acrobatic ways that look like something out of Cirque du Soleil if everyone involved was covered in mucus. As the movie goes on, though, they begin learning and sharing information with each other. Once one infected figures something out, the others essentially get the update. I thought that hive-mind concept was a really cool way to make a familiar threat feel different again.
They’re also just gross. There is this sticky white substance all over them that looks disturbingly close to marshmallow fluff, along with plenty of slobbering and other nastiness. It adds another layer of body horror to creatures that are already visually interesting.
Where Colony falls short is with the people we’re supposed to care about. The acting is good and the movie is well directed, but I never formed the same attachment to these characters that I did with Train to Busan. That’s a big difference when you’re watching people fight to survive for more than two hours.
And two hours is part of the problem. Colony absolutely could have been tighter. There are stretches where another room leads to another attack before everybody moves on to the next one, and the ending feels like it arrives more than once.
Those pacing issues kept this from being a Buyer for me, but the infected concept was inventive enough that I stayed engaged. There are still some very cool horror ideas here, and if I had paid to see Colony in a theater, I wouldn’t have walked out disappointed.
The infected are easily the best part of the movie. They start off incredibly feral, moving around in these fast, almost acrobatic ways that look like something out of Cirque du Soleil if everyone involved was covered in mucus. As the movie goes on, though, they begin learning and sharing information with each other. Once one infected figures something out, the others essentially get the update. I thought that hive-mind concept was a really cool way to make a familiar threat feel different again.
They’re also just gross. There is this sticky white substance all over them that looks disturbingly close to marshmallow fluff, along with plenty of slobbering and other nastiness. It adds another layer of body horror to creatures that are already visually interesting.
Where Colony falls short is with the people we’re supposed to care about. The acting is good and the movie is well directed, but I never formed the same attachment to these characters that I did with Train to Busan. That’s a big difference when you’re watching people fight to survive for more than two hours.
And two hours is part of the problem. Colony absolutely could have been tighter. There are stretches where another room leads to another attack before everybody moves on to the next one, and the ending feels like it arrives more than once.
Those pacing issues kept this from being a Buyer for me, but the infected concept was inventive enough that I stayed engaged. There are still some very cool horror ideas here, and if I had paid to see Colony in a theater, I wouldn’t have walked out disappointed.
Amy’s Review
I really wanted to like Colony. I love Train to Busan, which is saying something because I normally hate having to read subtitles through an entire movie. I have no problem doing it for that one because I’m so invested in the characters and what is happening to them. I expected Colony to grab me in a similar way, and it just didn’t.
The infected themselves are really cool. The way they move is probably what I’ll remember most about the movie. They’re incredibly fast, bend and crawl in strange ways, and sometimes look more like acrobats than traditional zombies. They’re also very gross, especially with all the white sticky stuff covering them. The problem is that I was more interested in watching how the infected moved than I was scared of them.
I also never connected with most of the characters. That’s where the comparison to Train to Busan hurt Colony the most for me. In that movie, I cared about the people almost immediately. Here, I understood what everyone was trying to do, but I didn’t feel particularly attached to them. There were a couple of exceptions. I felt terrible for one character who spends much of the movie being bullied. On the opposite end, there is another character who drove me absolutely crazy. She repeatedly makes terrible decisions while everyone keeps trying to save her, and after a while I was ready for the group to stop helping.
Mostly, though, Colony just wore me down. It started to feel like Groundhog Day: go into another area, get attacked, escape, and then do some variation of the same thing again. Even the infected learning new things became repetitive after I’d watched them go through the process several times. At about an hour and a half, we paused the movie and I realized there were still around 30 minutes left. My reaction was basically, “Oh my gosh, there’s still 30 minutes?”
There are good ideas here, and I can see why someone who wants a different take on fast infected horror might enjoy it more than I did. For me, the lack of emotional connection combined with the two-hour runtime eventually became too much, and by the end I had checked out.
The infected themselves are really cool. The way they move is probably what I’ll remember most about the movie. They’re incredibly fast, bend and crawl in strange ways, and sometimes look more like acrobats than traditional zombies. They’re also very gross, especially with all the white sticky stuff covering them. The problem is that I was more interested in watching how the infected moved than I was scared of them.
I also never connected with most of the characters. That’s where the comparison to Train to Busan hurt Colony the most for me. In that movie, I cared about the people almost immediately. Here, I understood what everyone was trying to do, but I didn’t feel particularly attached to them. There were a couple of exceptions. I felt terrible for one character who spends much of the movie being bullied. On the opposite end, there is another character who drove me absolutely crazy. She repeatedly makes terrible decisions while everyone keeps trying to save her, and after a while I was ready for the group to stop helping.
Mostly, though, Colony just wore me down. It started to feel like Groundhog Day: go into another area, get attacked, escape, and then do some variation of the same thing again. Even the infected learning new things became repetitive after I’d watched them go through the process several times. At about an hour and a half, we paused the movie and I realized there were still around 30 minutes left. My reaction was basically, “Oh my gosh, there’s still 30 minutes?”
There are good ideas here, and I can see why someone who wants a different take on fast infected horror might enjoy it more than I did. For me, the lack of emotional connection combined with the two-hour runtime eventually became too much, and by the end I had checked out.