Fantasia Festival ’26: Colony

군체
Gunche
***½/****
starring Jun Ji-hyun, Koo Kyo-hwan, Ji Chang-wook, Kim Shin-rok
written by Yeon Sang-ho, Choi Gyu-seok
directed by Yeon Sang-ho

by Walter Chaw Colony is Yeon Sang-ho’s return to the zombie feature (after Train to Busan and its animated sequel, Peninsula), a rip-roaring, often fascinating treatise on tech bros, social media, and the dangerous resolve of the mob. Per its name, Yeon’s zombies are hive animals–like ants, for instance, or bees–who gain a communal intelligence through an invisible, scent-based or possibly mycelial network. Using it, they learn from one another how to be better hunters and better evangelists for their “eat of my body, drink of my blood” contagion. They have done what Catholics once feared film could do. Colony‘s BigBad, in the final analysis, is the dangerous ability to connect with a group of people scattered around the world who agree with your worst ideas. When you were a lunatic incel moron creep in the pre-Internet era, you were shunned and disgraced. As it should be. Now? Now if you’re a deranged, flat-earthing, creationist Christian Scientist weirdo, you buy a red hat and join your fuckwit brethren looking for a golden idol who will piss on your adoring, upturned face. Consider how LLM chatbots are merely the poison of external validation mechanized for inhuman efficiency. People will still get tired of you, no matter how proudly you wear your prejudice and ignorance as a personality. An LLM will never get sick of your stupid, violent, grandiose delusions. Yeah, we’re double-fucked.

So what can defeat a voracious hive mind? A team, the film suggests, of scientists, public servants, IT professionals, and teenagers working in tandem through debate and reason might have a fighting chance. Colony‘s hero is Kwon Se-jeong (Jun Ji-hyun), a brilliant but unemployable professor of behavioural biology who attends a tech conference at a modern Seoul office/retail high-rise at the invitation of her ex-husband, Han Gyu-seong (Go Soo). “Why are you so interested in your ex-wife’s career?” she asks. She’s teasing him, but…it’s complicated. What does drive us? Is there a chemical reaction behind loyalty? And how much of us, finally, is the result of conditioning as opposed to evolutionary advantage? Han, happily married with a kid, is exasperated by the question. Kwon is the sort of unemployable, unfriendable, “difficult” woman who has earned that label by refusing to compromise her ethics or dignity. Powerful men, most men, find independent thought in women frustrating. Dependence is the social expectation. But she needs a job, having recently been fired by a dean she implies acted inappropriately towards her. “Can’t you just get along?” Han asks, and the look Kwon gives him. She’s the ideal champion against a throng of mindless, slavering followers. Men or zombies–same, same. One of the pleasures of Jun’s performance is her ability to convey the disappointed human being stuck beneath the shell she’s built around herself over a lifetime of taking shit for defining the standard of respect and decorum with which she wants to be treated, and holding the line. Note the scene where Han gets a FaceTime from his young family and Kwon pretends not to notice the little girl who comes on screen, nor care about the new wife. Their genuine concern for her is at odds with her worldview. Kindness makes her uncomfortable because the world is seldom kind to strong women. She’s armouring herself against hope. She’s wonderful.

Disgruntled former Chains Bio employee Dr. Seo (Koo Kyo-hwan) has created a virus that facilitates the reduction (elevation?) of human beings to a collective intelligence, largely at the cost of their individuality. He wants to abolish “the tragedy of miscommunication.” His engineered “cure” is ultimately spread through a thick goo transmitted via bite. The asterisk on all this “hive mind” stuff is that Dr. Seo himself is able to control the mass. This isn’t a plot hole. Rather, while Colony is about hive behaviours, it’s also about those who would exploit hive behaviours for their own nefarious purposes. Unlike our puppetmaster billionaire class, however, Dr. Seo isn’t after unimaginable riches and political power. He isn’t interested in building a colony on Mars or a fleet of yachts moored at a private archipelago. No, he’s a true believer that his invention is for the future good of mankind–a twenty-first-century Seth Brundle. For Dr. Seo, arrogant, awkward, and shunned, his invention will level the playing field for guys like him. That it also gives him dominion over the people who have hurt him, well, I mean, he is smarter than anyone, so shouldn’t he be trusted with the Ring of Power? Kwon is the distaff version of Dr. Seo in terms of being both a genius and outcast from the culture as a result. Neither are good at pretending. How can the “good” guys win when they have to manage multiple intelligences and beliefs under one tent? All the “bad” guys ever do is follow a single, simple, assimilationist impulse. As a metaphor for our world’s balkanization–violent ethnostates vs. progressive inclusion in the battle of wills between Seo and Kwon–it’s pretty good. But the picture’s also eviscerating how men respond to ostracization differently.

Of course, as is often the case with zombie movies, one could disregard the subtext and still enjoy some very fine zombie action, which is predictably frenetic but given an extra jolt of electricity by the wild, spastic movements of the experimental dancers playing the horde. Students of the genre will mark the echoes of Romero’s broadsides against capitalism, 28 Days Later‘s red-eyed ragers, Evil Dead Rise‘s chimeric monsters, and World War Z‘s insectile, synergic bogeys. The ghost of Bub from Day of the Dead even rears his head in the introduction of a thinking, calculating ghoul. Colony did trouble me with its uncomfortable, some would say clumsy, swerve into disability territory. One of the core heroes, Choi (Kim Shin-rok), is a wheelchair user whom the virus “fixes” when it activates inside her. I was irritated Yeon hadn’t cast a disabled actor, but if the prestige of this trick is her suddenly walking again once absorbed into the collective… Really, I want to find excuses for the film–and when I look for rationalizations, I suspect my bias is obscuring the pain of a community to which I do not belong. It’s easy to be cool with something, to help it “make sense,” when I’m not the target of dehumanization. The treatment of nerve damage is one of the early proposed applications of the zombie tech in Colony. In an age where the American administration is on the road to “banning” autism, is this a warning that “fixing” what isn’t necessarily broken is the road to apocalypse? Is that a fair equation? Or is it just a cheap exploitation of disability in a movie that wants to have its cake and eat it, too? It’s worth chewing over whether Colony does more good presenting its disabled character as courageous and intelligent or more harm in presenting the treatment of disability as dangerous folly.

For me, Colony works. It missteps mainly by biting off more than it can chew, but I’m inclined to see that kind of ambition as a net positive. It honours zombies as the preeminent metaphor for our calamitous state in the new millennium, evolving them, literally, to comment on the elements polluting our shared world: CEOs and Big Pharma, lonely loserdom, ethno-nationalism, amoral manipulators goading the weak-minded into committing violence. Colony isn’t exactly a downer, as it has people who fight back and sacrifice in the process of rebellion, though it doesn’t give us terribly good odds against geometrically scaling numbers. It shows us the path through while also demonstrating that said path is overgrown and covered in thorns. And it achieves this in the midst of staging large-scale action sequences that have weight and a sense of geography and prod the story along. On top of all the horror DNA in it, the picture’s got a little Die Hard as Chantilly. Colony is a smart movie for smart people. Sometimes it leans over its skis, but I guess in the final calculus, I prefer the films willing to open a can of worms, even if they don’t always have a plan for how to get them back in. It’s already cleaned up the Korean box office. I hope it finds an audience here, too. We could stand to start listening.