Rating: R | Runtime: 122 minutes
Release Date: May 21st, 2026 / August 28th, 2026 (USA)
Studio: Showbox / Well Go USA Entertainment
Director(s): Yeon Sang-ho
Writer(s): Choi Kyu-seok & Yeon Sang-ho

I’m used to people hating me.

Director Yeon Sang-ho returns to zombies six years after putting a pause on his Train to Busan series (an American remake and another Korean sequel are still in the works). This time he and co-writer Choi Kyu-seok skew more towards The Last of Us by way of a new form of “collective intelligence” being manufactured at a reputable biotech corporation. As with many capitalistic dystopias, however, the person selling it isn’t the one who created it.

Colony therefore begins with Seo Yeong Cheol (Koo Kyo-hwan) calling in a terrorist attack he’s about to unleash. The threat is a biological outbreak of which he declares he’s the vaccine. He tells the police the location (a conference held by the CEO of his former employer within a public marketplace high-rise) and then lurks in the background as his stolen research is pitched to the crowd. That audience doesn’t know it’s about to become Seo’s proof of concept.

The resulting infected are a gnarly bit of business. Whereas Cordyceps creates a simplistic hive mind system that connects them, Yeon’s iteration possesses the ability to learn, share information, and evolve together. So, while the initial onslaught feels feral and random with people crawling on all fours and getting confused by mannequins and LED advertisements, each misstep leads to the group tilting their heads upward to download the next “software” patch.

Soon they’re walking on two legs, differentiating between plastic and flesh, and even conserving energy by waiting for their next opportunity for proliferation rather than simply bashing their heads against glass walls. Thankfully, the small group of survivors serving as our protagonists has a biology professor amongst them to recognize this pattern. While Se Jeong (Jun Ji-hyun) seems to be one step ahead of these monsters, it’s only until the bigger picture gets revealed.

All the usual genre tropes are present within this new spin on the concept. You must be bitten to get infected and the infected are easily confused if they think you already are, but the wrinkle here is that Seo acts as a sort of puppet master—the Borg Queen, so to speak—with the power to see everything they see and course correct on a whim. So, when his “workers” get caught in a hiccup, he uploads new commands that rewrites the description of their target.

Se Jeong is the perfect unwitting hero at the center. Her ex-husband thinks she’s listless, but really she just can’t find people on her level to both not get frustrated with their idiocy and not have them get frustrated with what they believe is her ego. We learn pretty early that Se has no community of family or friends as a result, so she becomes a metaphor for the advantages of a closed loop system over the unwieldy and often volatile firehose of infinite cooperation.

That’s not to say she is cold or unfeeling, though. No, that’s the businessman and police officer sent to find Seo who are also part of her party. They have one-track minds thinking of their own survival first whereas Se proves her humanity by helping to save a paraplegic in-need (Kim Shin-rock’s Choi Hyeon Hui) until her security guard brother (Ji Chang-wook’s Choi Hyeon Seok) arrives. Those siblings conversely think only of each other at their own expense.

Yeon and Choi have thus crafted a very specific cast of characters to drive home their message about humanity’s flaws and strengths. I’ve seen a couple people dismissing Colony for writing “dumb” people refusing to come up with easy solutions to the central problem at-hand, but that’s kind of the point. The confusion and selfishness inherent to our species via fear is exactly what Seo hopes to eradicate with his mind virus. But it’s also what can save us.

Se is only here because her ex was worried about her well-being knowing she’ll be alone when he leaves for America with his new wife and daughter. Hyeon Hui is here on her vacation just to visit her brother in his place of work because getting out from behind her desk isn’t worth as much as being happy in his company. And all those dumb mistakes the rest make that ultimately lead to their own deaths are intentionally avoidable because we are intrinsically imperfect.

But not as imperfect as the hive mind that’s unable to get out of its own way when falling prey to its own deficiencies. The sheer fact that Seo must exist as the head of the snake shows their greatest weakness considering the whole idea of “collective intelligence” is to ensure everyone is on equal footing without jealousy or greed getting in the way. Why does he have power over them then? Why are they slaves to his whims? The whole is a metaphorical fascistic state too.

And Se is the leader of the free will rebellion. A scientific mind that understands the logic behind Seo weaponizing the ideal of a “greater good” into a protective shield as well as the human emotions to feel the cost of making the tough call that actually achieves it. Because choice is our greatest power. The choice to be brave or stupid. The choice to play politics or rip off the Band-Aid. The choice to be the pariah knowing it means your haters are still alive.

It’s a nice message only lost on audiences consisting of too many Seos who think they’re infallible because they know how to tear down a film’s infrastructure in a way that ensures they’ve missed the point. And it’s delivered with a great cast, a wealth of viscous fungal slime, and some of the most memorable “zombies” yet courtesy of acrobatic extras climbing atop each other before striking. Yeon always knows how to keep us entertained.

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A scene from COLONY; courtesy of Well Go USA Entertainment.