Bio-terrorism meets zombies in this Yeon Sang-ho feature, almost a decade after giving Cannes the chills with Train to Busan in 2016.
The moment Cannes announced its midnight screening with the name Yeon Sang-ho, the Korean director known for the award-winning zombie film Train to Busan (2016), it became one of the most sought-after screenings. The icing on the cake was that handsome actor Ji Chang Wook (The Worst of Evil) was also in the film, along with Jun Ji-hyun (My Love from the Star), Go Soo (Missing), and Koo Kyo-hwan (D.P.).
The film in question is Gun-Che (Colony), which attracted a lot of buzz even before the screening was announced. Thus, Colony went on to packed houses at all the screenings during the ongoing 79th Cannes Film Festival.
Colony’s midnight screening came with a familiar promise and a restless ambition to resurrect the zombie film once more, not through reinvention, but through refinement. Directed by Yeon Sang-ho, the filmmaker who electrified the genre with Train to Busan, this latest entry feels less like a departure and more like a distillation of everything he has been trying for nearly a decade.
Set within a sealed, hyper-controlled residential complex designed as a utopian refuge from an ongoing biological terror attack, Colony strips the zombie narrative down to its barest, most suffocating essentials. There are no sprawling cityscapes or chaotic evacuations here. Instead, Yeon Sang-ho confines us to corridors, surveillance systems, and human hierarchies that fracture long before the infected break through.
In this film, Yeon Sang-ho uses the genre to explore social hierarchies under pressure. This time, the action unfolds vertically: residents are divided by floors, access is tightly controlled, and the outbreak exposes fractures already embedded in the system.
What makes Colony compelling is not the novelty of its premise, but its precision. Director Sang-ho understands that the essence of the zombie film has never truly been about the undead — it is about systems under pressure. Much like Train to Busan turned a speeding train into a microcosm of class tension and moral collapse, Colony transforms vertical architecture into a social experiment. Floors become borders. Privilege becomes a form of immunity. And survival, once again, is negotiated rather than fought for, which was also seen in Yeon Sang-ho’s earlier film.
Visually, the film leans into sterility and repetition: white hallways, controlled lighting, regulated movement. This aesthetic choice pays off gradually, as the first signs of infection disrupt not just bodies but also the illusion of order.
In Colony, one can sense that the director uses dread to accumulate through silence, bureaucratic indifference, and the quiet brutality of exclusion, for when violence finally erupts, it feels less like an invasion and more like an inevitability.
The zombies, which are the director’s favourite kind of characters, although second to humans, help bring to the fore the idea that decisions made by institutions are more likely to fail than humans who are deemed expendable.
If the film falters, it does so in its final act, where thematic clarity edges toward didacticism. The metaphor becomes more explicit, and the character arcs more predictable, but it is the director’s precise control of pacing and tension that prevents the film from collapsing under its own weight.
The film favours atmosphere over spectacle in its first half, building tension through surveillance, restricted movement, and institutional response. When the infection spreads, it does so rapidly, bringing back the director’s signature fast-moving zombies. Colony may not mark a major evolution in Yeon Sang-ho’s filmmaking, but it reinforces his position as one of contemporary cinema’s most consistent voices in socially driven genre storytelling.
Our team is on site for the 79th Cannes Film Festival, from May 12 to 23, 2026.
