★★★★☆
Yeon Sang-ho’s Cannes shocker turns a biotech conference into a writhing, gloopy, hive-minded meat-pile, and really sticks the landing.
A decade on from Train to Busan (also screening at Tubi Frightfest this year), Yeon Sang-ho returns to the outbreak movie with something gloopier and stranger. A fast-mutating virus erupts at a biotechnology conference and swiftly renders the delegates into a churning hive of body-horror carnage – not the sprinting dead of his breakthrough film, but more a single spreading organism with a collective will.
After the disappointment of the director’s Busan follow-up Peninsula, this is a marked step back up: Yeon’s staging of chaos is first-rate, the set-pieces landing hardest in a strong final act that escalates the hive-mind conceit into something close to awe. The idea of a shared consciousness knitting the infected together gives him more to play with than the standard zombie template, and he uses it well.
Where Colony stumbles a little is in the middle stretch, which is more predictable and formulaic than the premise deserves, hitting beats you can see coming several corridors away. But the third act repays the patience, and Yeon’s command of large-scale mayhem – the legible geography of who is where and what is coming – is a reassertion that at his best he can be one of the genre’s best architects of chaos.
For fans of viral-outbreak horror who want their carnage with a novel wrinkle, and for anyone doing a Yeon double- or triple-bill this year (Seoul Station is also playing!), it’s a satisfying, splattery watch that builds to a storm of abject bodies.
Colony plays at Tubi FrightFest in London this weekend.