Film Review - Colony

Images courtesy of K-Movie Entertainment.

Yeon Sang-ho’s Colony is a run-of-the-mill zombie film with an interesting premise that is held back by its uninteresting plot, characters, and cinematography.

The film surrounds the outbreak of a virus at a biotechnology conference, rapidly infecting anyone in the building and turning them into a hive mind of zombies who are directly controlled by Young-chul. The building is then locked down, and the film follows the small number of survivors trying to escape without spreading the virus.

Ten years after the release of his critically acclaimed Train to Busan (2016), Yeon Sang-ho hasn’t made a film that’s managed to live up to both its pulse-pounding action and emotional sincerity. Colony, while a similar premise, feels like an uninspired attempt to capture the same success. The film’s premise is more unique than most, with zombies that get progressively smarter throughout the film, and the opening 30 minutes are quite engaging. However, the remaining hour and a half are sluggish and boring, suffering from very inconsistent pacing.

The cinematography of the film is what lets it down the hardest. It never really utilises the massive scale of the skyscraper nor does it make the audience feel confined or claustrophobic about being trapped in it. The audience’s lack of immersion in the environment is only reinforced by their lack of engagement with the characters. Early on, there are a variety of different character introductions that flow smoothly into one another, promising a rich and interesting cast of characters who will inevitably die in gruesome ways. Instead, the film proceeds to ignore them for most of the runtime. The protagonist could have used a stronger supporting cast to keep the audience engaged, so it isn’t just them talking to themselves before cutting to the antagonist giving a melodramatic bad-guy speech.

The film tonally feels a lot like a video game, beyond its explicit inspirations taken from The Last of Us and Resident Evil. The practical effects of the zombies are lifelike and disgusting (in a good way), with all of them being covered in a suitably gross amount of white mucus, but the special effects are where they fall short, with some pretty unrealistically rendered CGI zombies towards the end.

All in all, Colony is just another zombie movie. It shoots for the stars but doesn’t make it too far off the ground.

5 zombies with guns out of 10.

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Colony is screening in cinemas from Thursday the 11th of June. For tickets and more info, click here.