‘Colony’ (2026) Review – Yeon Sang-ho’s Return to Zombie Flicks Never Lets Up On the Carnage

At a point where it’s surprisingly rare to see one pop up now and again, it’s become quite the code to crack to bring something truly fresh to the zombie movie subgenre. That’s not to say, however, that it’s not possible, as the iconic groundwork George A. Romero laid decades ago has led to an array of innovation within the subgenre across all forms of media, including prolific videogame series like The Last of Us and Resident Evil.

Korean filmmaker Yeon Sang-ho is another director who brought his own unhinged stamp to the landscape of zombie flicks with the incredible Train to Busan, and his return to the subgenre after Peninsula with Colony shows you can teach an undead dog a mixture of both old and new tricks. Colony’s zombie carnage is, as expected, utterly unhinged to the point where it’s almost to a fault, as the film nearly collapses within its own overly long and convoluted narrative multiple times. Still, there’s a cleverly implemented twist at the heart of all the chaos surrounding the undead that never makes things make sense, leading to a familiar mishmash of many things we’ve seen in zombie media (including from Sang-ho himself), but the film is creative enough to keep its repetitive structure from entering a complete lull.

The setup for undead madness begins with Professor Kwon Se-jeong (Jun Ji-hyun), who is attempting to get a new job at a biotech conference with the help of her ex-husband Han Gyu-seong (Go Soo). Little do they know that an outbreak of madness will soon reign upon them as Seo Young-cheol (Koo Kyo-hwan) wants revenge against the company’s CEO, Kang Woo-cheol (Kim Jong-tae), and stabs him with a virus right after injecting himself with the vaccine for the virus before it inevitably spreads across the entire building and leads to outbreak mayhem.

With all the uninfected people quarantined inside the skyscraper, and the government clueless on how to stop the outbreak, Professor Se-jeong must work with a group of other survivors to outsmart the zombie horde and find Young-cheol, as he’s the only thing close to a cure they may have for the virus—but there’s a catch! With nearly every new interaction, the zombies are able to communicate with each other via a hive mind and walls lined with slime. This makes it easier for zombies to adjust from their mistakes and slowly become more human-like in their strategies of hunting down humans, making the challenges of survival for our main cast of characters twice as hard.

The central twist surrounding Colony’s brand of zombies is a clever one, albeit one that was also explored in the video game world with The Last of Us, but there are admittedly multiple points where the film attempts to stretch beyond the logical reasoning of the rules it sets. As the movie progresses, we learn that Young-cheol has the ability to mind-control the colony thanks to his dose of the vaccination, and when the movie starts to expand upon the limits of his abilities, it becomes progressively more convoluted.

Things tend to be dragged and dropped depending on their usefulness within the screenplay. Young-cheol’s abilities to control the hive are often made up whenever the story needs to progress to the next beat or the next character in the cast needs to be killed off. Train to Busan was so good at keeping the proper containment to its chaos while also balancing genuine pathos with its character, and in comparison, Colony, while mainly engaging, feels on the verge of collapsing within its own madness.

Luckily, despite Yeon Sang-ho shifting away from more emotionally resonant touchstones of zombie movie storytelling, the expansion of scale and zombie evolution in Colony still yields some effective results. There are multiple sequences here where, due to the zombies’ continued evolution, our heroes change their process of outsmarting them when turning out the lights or using cardboard cutouts as decoys start to not fool the undead masses anymore.

It’s genuinely thrilling to watch scenes of pure battle carnage and frantic chases alongside the quieter bits of suspense when characters need to be more careful with their surroundings, since the zombies can evolve to the point where they can walk on two legs rather than on all four in an animalistic manner. It’s not breaking any insane ground for the subgenre, but it adds the needed slight touch of freshness to keep all the more familiar aspects surrounding the narrative still riveting and exciting at every turn. The implemented rules of the zombie evolution are at their best early on but still maintain a grip of engagement even as they’re played fast and loose.

On top of it all is Sang-ho’s continued gift for capturing true manic carnage in his zombie action. There’s no shortage of goopy, mindless gore, and many genre heads will be more than satisfied, but it’s the way it’s shot that adds to the frenzied energy. There are so many POV shots to make us feel at one with the non-stop madness that surrounds our leads at every moment, and the camera is locked onto guns that make every moment of action escalate in intensity. There’s such a brisk manner to how each setting where action takes place is shot that by the time we’re in the 3rd act with full-on car ramming within the streets, it just feels like the next drop on a never-ending rollercoaster thrill ride.

Colony is a mishmash in both its borrowing of elements across so many forms of zombie media and in how much it feels like the haphazard nature of further stitching together the rules of its clever concept almost collapses the entire film, but it remains an effective showcase of non-stop manic zombie thrills and ingenuity despite its flimsy narrative foundation. It might not bring much new to the sub-genre, but its concept is fresh enough in the moment to keep it from being completely reanimated.

Colony will debut exclusively in theaters on August 28, 2026, courtesy of Well Go USA.