The Horde Is Watching and Learning

Read Time:7 Minute, 18 Second

MOVIE REVIEWS
Colony (Gunche)
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Genre: Horror, Action, Thriller, Sci-Fi
Year Released: 2026
Runtime: 2h 2m
Director(s): Yeon Sang-ho
Writer(s): Yeon Sang-ho, Choi Gyu-seok
Cast: Gianna Jun, Koo Kyo-hwan, Ji Chang-wook, Shin Hyun-been, Kim Shin-rock, Go Soo
Where to Watch: in select theaters August 28, 2026

RAVING REVIEW: A room full of infected people suddenly behaving like a hive mind is more unnerving than watching a hundred of them run wild with their own goals in mind. COLONY understands that speed stopped being enough to make zombies frightening a long time ago. Director Yeon Sang-ho helped reshape expectations for the genre with SEOUL STATION, TRAIN TO BUSAN, PENNINSULA, and his return to the infected doesn’t try to repeat the same ideas. These creatures learn. They share information. Their behavior changes as a group, forcing the people trapped with them to reconsider every rule about survival as soon as they think they understand it.

The infected keep developing in ways that make me curious about what they’re going to do next, while the humans around them aren’t always given the same opportunity to surprise us. Professor Kwon Se-jeong (Gianna Jun) arrives at a biotechnology conference already dealing with enough uncertainty in her own life before a mysterious infection begins spreading through the Doongwoori Building. Authorities lock down the 33-story structure, leaving Se-jeong and a collection of strangers inside as the infected begin behaving in increasingly peculiar ways. Reaching safety requires more than outrunning them because their opponents aren’t the same from one encounter to the next.

Yeon gets a lot of suspense from withholding the next stage of evolution. The infected crawling on all fours is disturbing. Watching them eventually stand is worse because it means something changed. Mimicry introduces another complexity. Group behavior introduces another. Each new development removes an assumption the survivors had been relying upon, and COLONY is most effective when it turns observation into part of survival.

Se-jeong is particularly well suited to that approach. As a biotech professor, she isn’t just the person who happens to make the correct decision whenever everyone panics. She watches patterns, forms theories, and adjusts when those theories fail. Gianna Jun gives her a unique kind of authority, rarely needing to turn determination into a speech or capability into heroics.

This is Jun’s first big-screen role in eleven years, and Yeon gives her a return built on action as much as dialogue. She runs, drives, fights, evaluates, and reacts without losing the sense that Se-jeong’s greatest advantage is her ability to think under pressure. There’s an immediacy to Jun’s performance that serves the movie, particularly when the action becomes enough that individual characters could easily disappear inside it.

Yeon brought back choreographer Jeon Young, who previously designed zombie motion for TRAIN TO BUSAN and PENINSULA, with the instructions to create something different. Twenty professional dancers were recruited to help develop the new movement stylization, and that decision is visible throughout COLONY. Bodies twist, crawl, rise, tremble, and fall in sync in ways that don’t resemble a collection of extras just sprinting toward the camera.

Yeon has spoken about the modern world’s constant exchange of information and the way collective knowledge increasingly influences individual thought. His zombies are an exaggerated endpoint of that anxiety. Information moves through them almost instantly, and whatever one member of the group learns becomes useful to the whole. Yeon is looking at what happens when accumulated knowledge becomes detached from individuality, and begins to process the same information together. The infected are frightening because intelligence has become shared.

Dr. Suh Young-chul sees exactly that possibility. Koo Kyo-hwan plays the biologist responsible for the outbreak, a man whose scientific intelligence has fused with a dangerous certainty that humanity needs to become something else. Koo avoids turning him into a mad scientist, and his calmness can be more disturbing than rage. Young-chul sees evidence of progress where everyone else sees mutilated bodies and terror. His philosophy gives Yeon plenty to work with, though the screenplay occasionally overexplains it. Additional dialogue sometimes underscores what the on-screen action has already made clear.

The rest of the survivors create several smaller emotional moments. Ji Chang-wook plays Hyun-seok, a security guard trying to protect his older sister Hyun-hee (Kim Shin-rock), who has paraplegia. His knowledge of the building gives the group an advantage, while their sibling relationship supplies some of the film’s deeper human stakes. Shin Hyun-been’s Sul-hee works from outside the lockdown, using her biotechnology expertise to understand what’s happening and communicate with Se-jeong. These characters are useful, likable, and capable of doing just enough to keep the story moving.

COLONY generates suspense more than attachment. Some characters make frustrating choices because the story needs another obstacle, and a few twists occur without enough time to hit with the intended force. The two-hour runtime sounds generous, although so much of it is devoted to explaining the outbreak, navigating the building, tracking the changes, and escalating the action that several relationships remain thinner than expected. The evolving creatures become the film’s most developed characters almost by accident. Fortunately, they’re fascinating characters.

Large sections of the Doongwoori Building were constructed as sets, including the shopping mall where the outbreak explodes into chaos, and the production deliberately limited the use of CGI. The difference becomes noticeable once bodies start piling into corridors and moving through confined spaces. There’s a noticeable impact to the collisions and enough detail that the building doesn’t feel like a collection of generic hallways assembled around action scenes.

The later action grows much larger as the film progresses, and some of the careful suspense is traded for scale. That exchange isn’t always preferred, but that's mostly just how zombie flicks work. COLONY is scarier when five infected people are learning something than when hundreds are attacking at once. Increasing the number of bodies naturally raises the immediate danger, but the smaller encounters give us time to notice precisely how wrong their behavior has become.

A few decisions also require more generosity than they should. Characters occasionally ignore obvious risks, plans depend on people behaving exactly as required, and the screenplay can bend its own logic when another set piece needs to be around the corner. None of that ruins the experience, though it adds unnecessary steps to a film built around characters supposedly learning to survive an opponent who adapts. The irony is hard to miss. The infected learn from mistakes faster than some of the humans do.

COLONY never reaches the emotional force that made TRAIN TO BUSAN such an enduring reference point, and comparing every Yeon zombie movie to that probably isn’t especially fair. The comparison is unavoidable because Yeon himself understands how much the genre has changed since 2016. Rather than pretending faster zombies will be enough again, he returns with an idea that asks what the next version could look like.

The answer is strange and often exciting. COLONY gives the infected something more dangerous than speed or strength. The ability to evolve and improve. Its human story can’t always keep pace with the invention unfolding on the other side of the door, but Yeon has found a reason to be nervous around zombies again.

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