Director Yeon Sang-ho’s “Colony” premiered Friday at the Midnight Screening section of the Cannes Film Festival, marking the “Train to Busan” director’s return to the zombie genre. This time, he gives the work a decidedly modern twist, reflecting his anxieties about artificial intelligence, collective behavior, and the erosion of human individuality.
“Through my work, I have always tried to express the fear and horror of today’s society,” Yeon told Variety. “My biggest fear is high-speed communications. It’s like a living thing, and in some ways it reduces our individualism, our individuality.”
Interest in this theme is the driving force behind “Colony,” which follows Se-jeong, a biotechnology professor played by Gianna Jun, attending a conference that ends in disaster when a rapidly mutating virus is unleashed. With authorities locking down the entire facility, the survivors find themselves trapped by a growing threat that behaves more like networked intelligence than traditional zombies.
For Yeon, the decision to revisit Zombie was less about rethinking familiar ground and more about finding the right vessel to explore modern-day anxieties. He points to the lasting influence of George A. Romero, noting that Night of the Living Dead and subsequent zombie films remain beloved because Romero was able to express the latent horror of the time through the undead.
“If you look at the history of these zombie movies, zombies actually represent the fear of the time and are really, really meaningful,” Yong says. “And zombies are called zombies in my movies, too, because that’s not the definition, but it represents the potential horror of our time.”
In 2026, that fear focuses on how rapid information exchange and artificial intelligence are reshaping human thinking into something collective and homogenized. “In a way, it’s like a living thing, and it reduces our individualism and individuality,” Yong observes.
The filmmaker’s research into viral colonies and collective organisms reveals interesting parallels with human society. “We can assume that each colony, each group, each virus has only one specificity, but in reality, even though they look the same, they themselves produce variants,” he explains. “Because if they’re all the same, if something happens to this particular organism or this virus, that’s a weakness. Because this weakness could lead to complete extinction.”
The biological imperative for diversity informs Yong’s broader philosophy of protecting minority voices within population structures. “I think human society can learn a lot about this, because it is very important for us to protect minorities in the face of universality.”
Yong’s concerns about collective behavior extend directly to artificial intelligence itself. “We need to consider what is special about AI,” he says. “Of course, it is artificial intelligence, the sum of all things that are universal. So when we talk about universality, it also includes errors and bugs, which in a sense are a minority perspective completely buried within it.”
For Yeon, AI’s ability to quickly find and synthesize universal opinions poses a fundamental problem. It eliminates the mutations and minority perspectives that biological systems and human societies need to survive. “Although AI is good at generating universal opinions, it has limitations when it comes to generating minority opinions due to mutations, which are a characteristic of living organisms,” he explains.
“Train to Busan” trapped the characters in the horizontal space of a speeding train, but “Colony” unfolds vertically inside an enclosed high-rise building. This change is not merely spatial, but symbolic, representing what Yong sees as the instability of human civilization itself.
“Vertical action means that human civilizations can quickly revert to a primitive state, the barbaric state we all knew before,” he says. This verticality also influences the viewer’s expectations about escape and survival. “Humans think that in order to survive, it’s better to move up, but in reality, in the movies, we know that moving up isn’t very useful.”
This setting also allowed director Yeon to explore a dimension not present in Train to Busan: the perspective of outsiders who believe containment is necessary. “There are people outside who want a complete lockdown and isolation of people inside,” he points out. “That’s the biggest difference from ‘Train to Busan.'”
This is an approach based on global experience with the COVID-19 pandemic. “Since then, we’ve all had the coronavirus experience,” Yong says. “I think that experience completely changed the way we all looked at it.”
In an age where visual effects can evoke virtually anything, Yong made the deliberate choice to convey the horror of “Colony” through physical performance. He hired three teams of professional dancers to embody the infected, rejecting the idea that creatures that share a hive mind should move in the same way.
“It’s not that we try hard to avoid CGI, but here we have real creatures, so that’s what happened,” Yeon explains. “Sure, they have all the characteristics of AI and zombies, but we wanted these creatures to be real.”
The metaphor he used for the dancers was “10 fingers on one hand playing the piano. So each one is on the other hand, which is the body, but each one has a specific role.” This is a choreographic approach that reflects the film’s thematic interest in how individuals function within a group while maintaining a distinct identity.
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Balancing blockbuster spectacle and philosophical exploration comes naturally to director Yeon, who is quick to credit the infrastructure built by previous generations of Korean filmmakers.
“I think it’s all really thanks to the Korean film industry,” he says. “Recently, we’ve been seeing famous directors like Lee Chang-dong, Bong Joon-ho, and Park Chan-wook, and they created the basic framework for us to make films that are commercial but at the same time highly artistic, so we really owe them a huge debt.”
This framework is what distinguishes Korean commercial films from other markets, Yong said. “This is just like the foundation. So we all try to make not just purely commercial films, but commercial films that also incorporate the auteur aspect. So I think that’s one of the biggest strengths of Korean cinema.”
The international success of Korean genre filmmaking opened up new collaborative opportunities for director Yeon. His Netflix thriller “Revelations” has Alfonso Cuaron on board as a producer, while Shinzo Katayama’s Netflix Japanese series “Human Vapor” will begin streaming on July 2nd. The series was inspired by 1960s films and Hideo Okuda’s novel The Olympic Ransom, allowing Yong to work in unfamiliar cultural territory.
“It was really nice to be able to collaborate on this project because it takes place in a country I don’t know and it’s not my usual environment,” he says.
Yeon is completing post-production on “Paradise Lost,” a darker, more intimate project that expands on the themes of his 2025 film “The Ugly.” Inspired by the low-budget works of Asian masters such as Edward Yang and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, “Paradise Lost” tells the story of a mother who uses AI services to virtually resurrect her dead infant son, only to have his biological son return nine years later.
“It’s a very dark movie, and it’s completely different from the big movies I usually make,” says director Yeon. “But I don’t want to focus on just one type of film. I really want to have the parallelism of making both independent, low-budget films and all of those commercial films together.”
Looking further ahead, director Yeon has hinted at an international project that would be completely outside of Korean-language cinema, but has remained tight-lipped about details.
For now, his focus remains on Colony’s Cannes Film Festival debut, where he walked the red carpet on Friday night with a cast that includes Jun, Koo Kyo-hwan, Ji Chang-wook, Shin Hyun-bin and Kim Shin-rok. It’s a moment that encapsulates just how far Korean genre films have come on the world stage, and how filmmakers like Yeon continue to find fresh resonance in familiar forms.
“I feel really lucky to be working as a director today,” Yong reflects, comparing the current debates about streaming platforms, AI, and cinematic identity to the artistic ferment that followed Marcel Duchamp’s Dadaism. “All of these discussions really enriched the art back then. So I think it’s the same with movies today because of the exploration of platform and identity. All of that enriches movies today.”
