I admire how little setup writer/director Yeon Sang-ho requires for his high-concept chillers. For Colony, it takes less than ten minutes to get into the action, and things barely pause for breath until the credits roll. It feels like, after the laborious Peninsula, which served as a quasi-sequel to Train to Busan, Sang-ho has figured out how to keep the exposition to a minimum.
This doesn't mean that there isn't a plot; it's just tremendously economical. A mammoth pharmaceutical company is prepping for the launch of its latest bio-engineered wonder, and they've invited a host of doctors and luminaries for the presentation.
In the background, a spiteful former employee, whose ideas form the backbone of the research, plots his revenge. For him, mankind needs to evolve, preferably in his image, and what better place to start than with his former employer.
Meanwhile, Kwon Se-jeong (Jun Ji-hyun) arrives at the conference in hopes of a job, only to find herself leading a ragtag group of survivors in the face of a horde of the undead.
Sang-ho's film moves at a brisk pace, stopping only at very minor intervals to remind us of the rules. The zombies work as a hivemind, so if one sees some new vital piece of information, then momentarily the rest will know about it, too. This leads to a few wonderfully devious turns, as the survivors must constantly invent new ways to avoid their lumbering pursuers.
Colony is also the most Capcom-coded film I've seen to date. Capcom is a Japanese developer behind horror games such as the Resident Evil series, and Colony openly riffs on the franchise lovingly throughout. It's not overt, and a lot of it is probably just because they share the same DNA, but it is there. For fans of both zombies and the decidedly silly action saga, it means Colony will land even better.
Sang-ho's fascination with supremely mobile zombies continues in Colony, and the results, while not as audacious as in Train to Busan, are still impressive. As the hivemind tries to parse new information, the zombies move in and out of pattern formations and massive collections of bodies and limbs seeking new forms. In one of the most shocking sequences, they take over an entire hallway, as arms and legs reach out from a heaving mass to find a surface to grab onto.
This is part of the great fun of Sang-ho's nightmarish visions. It isn't enough that there are zombies; they're almost a force of nature themselves. Sure, you could ask why they don't just escape the building and wreak havoc on a larger scale, and the film does give an in-universe explanation that is flimsy but workable. But asking those kinds of questions misses the point. Colony is a haunted house ride that is intentionally on rails. Even when we briefly catch a glimpse of the world outside, everything leads back to the main event.
It doesn't reinvent the genre like Train to Busan, but that would be a tall order for any film, let alone a third one from the same filmmaker. Instead, Colony is merely a thrilling and gloriously violent ride from a master of the genre. If that's all we have to settle for, I'd say we're a bit spoiled.
