Colony

Yeon returns to action-horror with “Colony” an entertaining if empty-headed exercise in familiarity, with a few neat new tricks up its bloodstained, gore-flecked sleeve.

At a narrative level, it pulls from modern anxieties surrounding surveillance, the unfettered spreading of information and the trauma of contagion (and indeed lockdown), But, as you would expect from the director of 2016’s Train To Busan, Colony’s main draw is its visuals, its carefully choreographed action sequences unfolding at a breakneck pace saturated by lashings of gore.

There’s not a great deal that’s new here, though the idea of the zombies rapidly evolving with the aid of fungi-like mucus and an ant colony’s hive communication is well deployed. But what makes Colony a fun night out is how well the mayhem is staged.

It takes what could be a lean, mean little zombie movie and jams in too much excess noise, when the most impactful bits came from keeping things simple. Even as it’s not without its merits, it’s a film that can’t keep getting out of its own way, constantly stacking more and more nonsense on top of itself until it nearly buckles under the weight.

Colony is literal and uncritical in the application of its ideas so that genuine fear is obliterated in exchange for a blasé familiarity. We don’t expect superlative fascist critique at every turn, or a treatise on team-level failure within behemoth institutions, but at least bring emotionality and intimacy with your more clear-eyed pacing.

Zombie projects can be smart, but this project seems too unsure of its own identity to fully commit to the zany ideas Yeon has in store. It would have been better to stick to being brainless.

Flawed and forgettable, Colony fails to build toward anything substantial, resulting in a film filled with swarms of zombie-like denizens lacking any real stylistic or narrative bite.