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(Fright Fest Uk 2026) COLONY: What Else do Zombies Have to Do to Be Considered Original? 

By. Radek Velicka

Republished with permission. Original article was published HERE.

Yeon Sang-ho returns to zombie horror with a film that may not reinvent the genre, but whose infected still have plenty of surprises in store.

Yeon Sang-ho returns to zombie horror after Train to Busan. Critics argue that he brings nothing fundamentally new to the genre. But when the infected learn, communicate with one another and move like a single organism, I start wondering what else we are actually supposed to want from them.

 

Train to Busan director Yeon Sang-ho returns in Colony to the genre he is still most closely associated with. This time, he traps a group of people inside a high-rise building, where an outbreak erupts during a biotechnology conference and the surrounding area is subsequently cut off from the outside world. On paper, there is admittedly nothing here that we have not seen in some form before. Yet the argument that Colony is “more of the same” appears surprisingly often in reviews. Metacritic shows predominantly mixed reactions, with critics hovering around the six-out-of-ten range even while frequently praising the visuals, pacing, choreography and the infected themselves. And that is probably where I disagree with them the most.

We Have Seen Zombies Before. These Work a Little Differently

Colony is built on familiar foundations. A group of survivors trapped in an enclosed space gradually searches for a way out. Several characters who look unlikely to make it to the end credits indeed do not. But if every new zombie film is automatically going to be penalized simply because it still contains zombies, it becomes increasingly difficult to say what exactly we expect the genre to do.

Because the infected here are excellent.

And I do not just mean their appearance. More importantly, the way they move, twist, cluster together and react to their surroundings gives them far more personality than most anonymous movie hordes. This time, they are not simply a mindless mass sprinting toward the nearest human being. They learn and communicate, somewhat like the collective intelligence seen in the acclaimed series Pluribus. One infected person’s experience can therefore be passed on to the others.

This collective sharing of information is one of the film’s central ideas, and even some of the more critical reviews identify it as one of Colony‘s most interesting concepts. Once their behavior begins changing according to what they have already experienced, the film produces some of its best sequences. Suddenly, the survivors cannot simply discover one easy trick and keep using it for the next two hours.

A Breathtaking Audiovisual Experience

Colony looks fantastic. The camera makes excellent use of the building, whether in claustrophobic passages or larger-scale action sequences, but the biggest surprise for me was the music. At times, it is absolutely terrific. It pounds through the soundtrack, drives scenes forward and frequently creates an additional layer of tension. It is exactly the kind of horror film that benefits enormously from being seen on the big screen with a powerful sound system.

Above all, the film is tense. Not necessarily because I was constantly terrified that every individual character might die, but because I enjoyed watching the situation continue to escalate and wondering what the infected would do next.

If there is one thing I missed on the audiovisual side, it was a little more commitment to gore. Colony is hardly some sanitized family-friendly zombie adventure, its US distributor gave it an R rating specifically for bloody violence. Still, with monsters this imaginatively designed, I occasionally wished Yeon Sang-ho had pushed things even further.

Maybe that was deliberate. Perhaps the goal was to keep the film accessible to a broader audience. But when your infected can deform themselves and assemble into such bizarre shapes, it almost feels like a missed opportunity not to exploit that potential more brutally.

The Biggest Problem Is Not the Zombies. It Is the People

I do have one more complaint. The group of survivors is nowhere near as distinctive as it needs to be. Se-jeong, played by Gianna Jun, works well, and a few of the other characters receive enough attention for me to care about their fate, but much of the remaining ensemble feels as though they are simply there to fill out the numbers.

When it becomes obvious that someone is probably going to die, I should be hoping that I am wrong. With Colony, there were several characters where my reaction was closer to: all right, so who is next?

The siblings work much better, particularly Ji Chang-wook’s character, who gradually shifts into something close to Rambo mode. His transformation from a relatively ordinary member of the group into someone who simply refuses to stop fighting is one of the film’s most entertaining elements.

At the same time, it exposes another weakness in the screenplay. Some developments are simply too easy to read. The film emphasizes something, plants a particular detail, and it becomes fairly obvious why it is there and that it will come back later.

A few surprises still land very well. In particular, one of the first significant deaths arrives earlier than I expected and briefly disrupts the feeling that I already know exactly what role every character is supposed to play.

Koo Kyo-hwan Does Not Need to Be a Zombie to Be Terrifying

Alongside the infected, the film has another ace up its sleeve: Koo Kyo-hwan. Seo Young-cheol is a fantastically unsettling villain. Not in the overly theatrical sense of someone who stops every five minutes to explain his evil plans. His expression, his behavior and his absolute conviction that he is right are more than enough.

On one side are people gradually ceasing to be human. On the other is someone who remains completely human, yet at times feels far more frightening than any of them. His presence also helps the film whenever simply running away from the infected threatens to become repetitive.

Is There Really Nothing New Left to Invent?

Colony is not a flawless film. Some of its human characters could have been more distinctive or better written, and several screenplay developments can be predicted well in advance. At the same time, however, it offers terrific visuals, a fantastic pounding score, brilliantly designed infected, several excellent action sequences, a genuinely effective villain and two hours during which I was barely bored for a moment.

Yeon Sang-ho certainly is not making a film that leaves audiences indifferent. In South Korea, Colony has already attracted nearly six million moviegoers and grossed more than $45 million. At the time of writing, that makes it the fourth highest-grossing film of the year at the Korean box office and the second most successful domestic release of 2026.

And I genuinely do not understand why this particular kind of horror movie should be dismissed primarily because someone has used its basic framework before. A western does not have to reinvent the horse every time either.

I do not know exactly what zombies still have to do to be considered sufficiently original. In Colony, they learn, communicate, share their experiences and move in ways I can barely remember seeing anywhere else in the genre. If even that is not enough, perhaps the problem is no longer zombie movies, but our expectations of them.

 

Colony may not reinvent zombie horror, but it handles familiar ingredients with such audiovisual force, imaginative infected and relentless momentum that I found myself captivated by almost every scene. Stronger characters and a less predictable screenplay could have pushed it even higher, but I still had an absolute blast.