NYAFF 2026 Review: COLONY Puts Yeon Song-ho Back In The Undead Driver's Seat

Zombies in a mall, you say? It’s been done before but leave it to Korean genre master Yeon Song-ho to take everything you think you know about the living dead and crank it up to eleven and you’ve got another certified classic in Colony, enjoying its North American premiere this weekend at the New York Asian Film Festival.

Colony opens at a biotech conference taking place and the Dongwoori high rise complex. One floor hosts tech talks while various other levels host a number of shopping and office spaces. While a keynote speaker extols the endless possibilities of adapting natural biocommunication among slime moulds as a way of moving medical science forward, the rest of the building goes on about their business. What no one knows is that Seo Yeong Cheol (Koo Kyo-hwan) has decided that this is the perfect time to execute an experiment that will soon turn the entire building and its hundreds of occupants into a massive continuous horde of unstoppable monsters, and that’s just the beginning.

Directed by Yeon, and co-written by Yeon and Choi Kyu-seok, Colony takes a number of long-established zombie tropes and mutates them into something completely new and unrelentingly tense that is sure to have audiences gritting their teeth for the entirety of its blistering two hour run time. Taken in pieces, Colony doesn’t sound like anything special, zombies in a mall, fungus driven infections, malevolent instigators, claustrophobic locations; but as a whole, this is a very different animal.

It’s been a decade since Yeon burst onto the global scene with his Cannes breakout film, another instant zombie classic, Train to Busan. That film also didn’t attempt to reinvent the wheel but rather chose to streamline and focus the tension and energy into a finite space and time that gave the story real stakes. Though his follow-up Peninsula lacked the same kind of contained fury as its predecessor, Yeon still has a fire in his belly to tell these stories with real, definite stakes, and large casts of characters we all care for.

Yeon continues this trend with Colony, pitting a half dozen core characters against a mass of not-quite-dead antagonists, this film establishes emotional stakes almost immediately. Through a combination of clever, efficient writing, and zombies who waste no time getting down to the nitty gritty, Colony fosters an anything-goes attitude that pays off over and over again.

Ju Ji-hyun, the iconic star of 2001’s My Sassy Girl, as professor Kwon Se-jeong, anchors a cast of film and TV stalwarts fighting for survival in what is very possibly one of the grossest, gooiest zombie films ever made. Her steady presence allows the rest of the cast and film to go absolutely apeshit at every opportunity, delivering what is the most surprising zombie spectacular in recent years.

Just as Train to Busan challenged and exceeded expectations of what a movie about the living dead could deliver back in 2016, Colony once again brings the shock and awe needed for a film like this to work. Just when you think you know the rules, the film adapts and evolves along with its characters to force the audience and our cinematic proxies to rethink our next move. It’s a radical, exciting, unpredictable tactic that keeps everyone – on screen and off – on their toes.  A film that lulls the viewer into a state of equilibrium before suddenly changing the rules in a way that never gets old, Colony is an exhilarating ride from start to finish,