I finally watched Colony, the new film from Yeon Sang-ho, the same director behind Train to Busan. The moment I saw his name on another zombie movie, I already knew I had to watch it. His earlier work set such a high bar that I walked in with expectations, maybe unfairly high ones. I was bracing myself for more of those fast, snarling zombies tearing down a train carriage. What I got instead quietly messed with my head, in the best way.
(Heads up: spoilers ahead.)
The zombies in Colony are on a completely different level. They are not just mindless bodies chasing the nearest warm thing. They have some kind of consciousness. They learn. They communicate with each other. There is a genuine intelligence in the way they move as a group, almost like they are thinking as one. Set them next to the zombies in Train to Busan and the difference is night and day. These ones have evolved, and that single idea is what kept me thinking long after the movie ended.
What also worked on me was the setting. Most of the film traps you inside one building, and that claustrophobia does a lot of the heavy lifting. There is no wide-open escape, no running into the sunset. Just walls, corridors, and people slowly realising there is nowhere left to go. A few scenes hit harder than the rest, either emotionally or because they made me sit up and actually think.
The opening: two professors who couldn’t make it work
The film opens at a biotech press conference inside the building, where we meet two professors who used to be married. They have since separated. From what I could tell, the husband simply couldn’t keep up with the way his wife thinks, that standalone, doesn’t-quite-fit-the-mould kind of mind. They are not together anymore, but they still operate side by side like close colleagues. It is a strange dynamic, a little awkward, a little tender, and somehow it works. I liked that the film let them be complicated instead of forcing a tidy backstory on us.
The “vaccine” and the rooftop evacuation route
There is a moment where a policeman gets hold of the so-called “vaccine”, which turns out to be a mastermind rather than a vial. He tries to drag this man up to the excavation roof, and he is so desperate to do it that he shoots one of his own team members along the way. After all that, he still doesn’t make it out. Watching it, one line kept running through my head: when self-interest takes over, people will do whatever it takes (人为了利益 是会不择手段), and their thinking bends to the extreme. It is uncomfortable to watch because it feels true. Strip away the safety nets, and you find out fast what someone is willing to trade.
The wife, the SWAT team, and being believed only once
The professor’s wife heads into the infected building to figure out what is actually going on. Because she is seen as the more influential voice, she is the one sent to speak to the authorities. She tells the SWAT and government teams that if they kill that first person that gets infected, everything will stop. So they hunt him down via CCTV search and kill him. However, it doesn’t stop. It gets worse. Most of the SWAT team ends up infected and turns, right in front of everyone. That scene taught me something blunt about how big organisations work. The moment your call turns out wrong, you only get believed once, never twice. Later, when she insists they have to kill the person carrying the vaccine (which is the mastermind), nobody listens. They have already written her off as someone who lied, and by then everyone is just trying to save their own skin. The tragedy is that she might have been right the second time. It just no longer mattered, because trust had already left the room.
What I took away
A few things stuck with me after the credits rolled.
1. When self-interest is at stake, people will do almost anything, and their thinking slides toward the extreme (为了利益 不择手段). The film keeps showing you this, quietly, until you can’t unsee it.
2. The whole “collective organism” idea is fascinating and unsettling at the same time. If humans could be controlled and merged into one mind, sure, everyone would move in perfect sync. But that is just groupthink with extra steps. The price of all that harmony is the freedom to decide for yourself.
3. If you always follow the crowd and never voice your own opinion, you slowly lose the ability to make your own judgement at all. Use it or lose it, even when it comes to thinking.
4. Which leaves me with the question the whole film kept poking at: is being the one who doesn’t fit in (不合群) actually a flaw? Or is it just having a mind of your own?
For a zombie movie, Colony left me chewing on far more than I expected. And here is the part I love. The Korean title, 군체, literally means “collective body”. Once you know that, the film stops being just a horror flick and turns into a quiet question about how much of yourself you quietly give up, just to belong.
That last question is the one that followed me out of the cinema, because it is one I have lived. I have spent most of my life not quite following the script everyone else seemed to be reading from, and for a long time I assumed that made me the problem, the one who didn’t fit. Colony made me wonder if I had it backwards. Maybe the people who never break from the group aren’t safer, just quieter. And maybe being a little 不合群 was never the flaw I thought it was. Maybe it was just me, holding on to the right to think for myself.