Seven days remain until Colony arrives in cinemas, a South Korean outbreak horror film from director Yeon Sang-ho, the filmmaker behind Train to Busan. This time the setting shifts from a moving train to a sealed biotech facility, where a rapidly mutating virus gets loose during a conference and traps a small group of survivors inside with the infected.
Gianna Jun leads as Professor Se-jeong, alongside Ji Chang-wook and Koo Kyo-hwan, as the group tries to survive not just the infected but the facility's own lockdown. Yeon also wrote the script alongside Choi Gyu-seok, his regular collaborator, continuing a partnership that's shaped some of the more inventive Korean genre films of the last decade.
What sets Colony apart from a typical outbreak film is its central conceit: the infected aren't just individually dangerous, they're described as functioning with something closer to a hive mind, adding a layer of coordinated threat rather than simple chaos.
It sits at a 57 on Metacritic ahead of its US release, which feels about right for a smart, if familiar, spin on the genre rather than a full reinvention.
For anyone who's been waiting for Yeon Sang-ho to return to outbreak horror since Train to Busan first put him on the map, Colony looks like exactly that, just with the walls closing in this time instead of the doors.
