Here is another frenzied K-zombie action-horror from Yeon Sang-ho, the director of Train to Busan and Peninsula. Colony is frontloaded with 10 minutes of sciencey exposition and setup during which a biotech CEO mentions maze-solving slime mould and the pioneering work of the entomologist William Wheeler on the hive minds of ant colonies. Then the CEO is injected with a disgruntled former employee’s bright green liquid tech – it always needs to be bright green in such circumstances – and becomes the first victim of a bio-terror attack that traps a small cross-section of South Korean society in a tower block with hordes of fast-moving rabid flesh-munchers. An hour and three quarters of goopy, bloody mayhem ensue.
An upscale shopping mall occupies the lower floors of the tower, and it takes some nerve to give your zombie film much the same setting as Dawn of the Dead, the masterwork of the godfather of the genre George A Romero. Thankfully Colony can boast an innovation: these zombies have a hive mind, an emergent collective intelligence that makes them more formidable adversaries than your average braindead stumbler. The moment that one of the infected notices you and screams, as in Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, they all turn and attack.
And as they do, spasmodically jerking in unison, all angular limbs and unnatural angles, or while they writhe and entwine as they pile upon and devour their latest victim, the importance of movement choreographer Jeon Young is clearer than ever. A collaborator on each of Sang-ho’s zombie films, but this time working with a company of South Korea’s top contemporary dancers, Young makes many of the action and gore scenes resemble something you might see on stage at Sadler’s Wells. Michael Jackson’s Thriller video might have done it first but Colony does it better, more scarily and on an epic scale.
As in every zombie movie, the non-infected must collaborate to have any chance of survival. Thankfully a couple of them were attendees of the biotech conference at the start of the film, so Professor Se-jeong (Gianna Jun) becomes the de facto leader of the group and may just be able to outsmart even these massed ranks of collectively non-stupid zombies. She isn’t set up as the most likable character: honest to a fault, possibly somewhere on the spectrum and without much time for social niceties. But then conformism, bureaucratic groupthink and mindless techno-consumerism are the villains here; the heroes are the outcasts and free-thinkers.
• Colony is in UK and Irish cinemas from 28 August
