Yeon Sang-ho gives familiar monsters new ways to frighten us. We value his physical invention, though Colony shows how repeated explanations and thin characters can weaken an unsettling idea.
Fi1m perspective
The infected in Colony (2026) think together, making a high-rise outbreak harder to contain. Yeon Sang-ho is still finding useful changes to the zombie rules, even if this decent, uneven film spends too long explaining them. We were unnerved by the infected choreography, which makes the danger of their shared intelligence clear without another explanation.
His first feature animation, The King of Pigs (2011), dealt with bullying and social violence. The Fake (2013) followed before the live-action breakthrough of Train to Busan (2016), where zombie horror carried both social concerns and emotional weight. The animated prequel Seoul Station (2016) meant that the move into live action did not amount to leaving animation behind.
From there, Peninsula (2020) expanded the zombie world into a post-apocalyptic setting, while Hellbound (2021) took supernatural horror into television and religious critique. The recurring interests are collective behaviour, conformity and greed, all useful subjects for a director who works with crowds of dangerous bodies. But Colony shows the difficulty: changing how the zombies behave does not automatically make the survivors interesting.
Writing Colony with Choi Gyu-seok, Yeon gives the infected a more distinctive identity than the survivors. Gianna Jun's Kwon Se-jeong suffers from thin characterisation, leaving the circumstances to do too much of the work of making us care. Koo Kyo-hwan finds more to do as the scientist Seo Young-cheol. His unnerving presence makes a familiar villain less predictable, and the human scenes improve when he is involved. The repeated explanations take time that might have been better spent giving the ensemble something more distinctive to play.
Train to Busan, with its emotionally driven horror, is the sensible place to begin. We would not make Colony the test of everything Yeon can do, but it makes our reservation plain: cleverer monsters still need people worth worrying about. Save it for an evening when inventive zombie action is enough.
Biography
Yeon Sang-ho is a South Korean film director and screenwriter. He graduated from Sangmyung University with a degree in Western Painting and began his career directing animated short films before establishing his own production company, Studio Dadashow, in 2004.
He wrote and directed the animated features The King of Pigs (2011) and The Fake (2013), followed by the live-action zombie thriller Train to Busan (2016) and its animated prequel Seoul Station (2016). Subsequent works include Psychokinesis (2018), Peninsula (2020), the Netflix series Hellbound (2021), JUNG_E (2023), Parasyte: The Grey (2024) and the film Colony (2026), which he directed and co-wrote.
