Initially intriguing before it spirals into repetitive claptrap, Yeon Sang-ho’s “Gun-Che (Colony)” is one of those horror films that is propelled solely by the ineptitude of its characters. If you’ve come for carnage, particularly action with a grounded feel, you’ll get that in spades here.
Working with an impressive array of stunt performers, contortionists, make-up artists and production designers, Yeon has added another exciting new wrinkle to zombie lore.
His zombie filmography, from “Train to Busan” to “Hellbound” can be traced as a series of ways he’s transformed shambling monsters into creatures of terror. (To date, I’ve never seen zombies move quite as fast in other media as they do in “Train to Busan.”) And, with “Gun-Che (Colony),” he reimagines them as creatures that can communicate with each other, able to work as teams that can channel their force rather than just be mindless consumers. It’s an interesting idea, and while the action sequences deliver, there isn’t enough meat on the bone to feel invested in any of the characters we see — in spite of the ways Yeon clearly tries to mine the same pathos of his more elevated undead fare.
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.
Thankfully, he wastes no time throwing us right into the heart of the action. A movie like this needs to draw blood fast instead of poking around for a vein, and we learn that Seo Young-cheol (Koo Kyo-hwan), a disgruntled employee of a biotech company, plans to unleash a biological virus he was working on before having his ideas stolen by his superiors at a biotech conference.
We meet various characters before Seo infects patient zero, most of whom we know exist as red shirts for the horde of zombies to devour. There’s Kwon Se-jeong (Jun Ji-hyun), a biotechnology professor who agrees to meet with her ex-husband, Han Gyu-seong (Go Soo), as he tries to offer his wife a job at the same biotech company Seo was let go from. We meet Choi Hyun-seok (Ji Chang-wook), a security guard at the facility where the conference is taking place. There’s a handful of others we meet, from sushi chefs to students, who get brief hints of backstory before we jump to the next target.
It’s clear we’re not meant to be invested in these characters, save for Kwon, which would be fine if Yeon didn’t try to carve emotional beats around these people’s deaths.
Once Seo unleashes the virus, it doesn’t take long for the facility to go on lockdown, and only a handful of survivors are left unaffected. The zombies are terrifying because of the ways they’re willing to contort and often break their bodies in pursuit of their targets. The sound department, particularly Julien Paschal, the sound mixer, does immersive work by making each bone snap, jaw crack and lurch feel stomach-churning. We get plenty of close-ups of the zombies, and we can tell these are real actors making these twisted expressions. It’s impressive just from a choreography standpoint alone.
In theory, a chamber piece where survivors have to try and fight their way to the top of the facility to escape should be thrilling, but Yeon undermines the homerun of a premise by making the path to that escape more convoluted than it needs to be.
As previously mentioned, what separates these zombies is their ability to instantly communicate new information to the rest of the horde, like a massive spasm of AirDrop. This makes the survivors’ escape trickier because they can’t use the same tricks twice, as the zombies will adapt to them. It feels like Yeon couldn’t find a way for his characters to beat such powerful antagonists, and so he resolves it by making the protagonists slip up.
Take a sequence where, after Kwon and her crew have captured Seo, they all agree not to speak openly about their escape plan since Seo, who has bonded with the zombies, is able to control them, conducting the undead the way a maestro might an orchestra. In the next scene, two of the characters bicker about their intentions, with Seo immediately commanding the zombies to thwart their plan. We all make mistakes, and I imagine the pressure of a zombie outbreak only exacerbates the potential for slip-ups, but these developments happen more than once and feel less born out of the situation itself and more like bad writing.
Whenever Yeon Sang-ho has a new project, his films are usually marketed as being from “the director of Train to Busan.” That was ten years ago, and while Yeon has directed projects since, it’s evident he hasn’t been able to reach the highs of his breakout hit.
One of my favorite scenes was where we witness one of the characters on the titular train, caught on one side by zombies and on the other side by terrified survivors who would betray their fellow man to survive. It was a clever way to denote how dissimilar we were from the monsters that haunt us. Yeon occasionally scrapes at the kind of thematic provocations with his new creations, but these moments are too far in between, with Yeon not knowing how to fill the gaps of time left between each of his impressively built set pieces.
A line from the film summarizes this problem best: imperfect communication is the source of all tragedy, and the many parts of “Gun-Che (Colony),” though stellar in isolation, tragically never communicate with each other well enough to form a compelling whole.
