By MICHAEL GINGOLD
The new take on zombies just won a standing ovation at its Cannes Film Festival world premiere.
Having reinvented the undead genre with 2016’s TRAIN TO BUSAN, director Yeon Sang-ho is back with COLONY, which will have its North American premiere as the Opening Night feature at the New York Asian Film Festival, running July 11-27 at four Manhattan venues. It stars Gianna Jun (MY SASSY GIRL, ASSASSINATION), Koo Kyo-hwan, Ji Chang-wook, Kim Shin-rock and Shin Hyeon-bin; the synopsis: “COLONY follows Professor Se-jeong [Jun] as she is thrust into a terrifying hellscape when a mutating virus is unleashed during a biotech conference, forcing authorities to seal the facility to contain the outbreak. Unable to escape, Se-jeong and a group of survivors must fight to stay alive as the infected undergo horrific transformations and threaten to spread the virus.”
“The charismatic creatures we call zombies have served as symbols of the fears of their respective eras and evolved with the times,” Yeon says. “So when I set out to make COLONY, I asked myself, what are the anxieties of the era we are living through now? We live in an era in which information is exchanged at blinding speed. As a result, individuality is gradually being displaced by a collective consciousness. The zombies in COLONY are a product of this new world. I conceived of these beings not as products of fantasy, but as manifestations of the collective intelligence we encounter in our era of hyper-rapid information exchange. I hope that, amidst this horror, the audience might finish the film with the question, ‘What is it that makes humans human?’ lingering in a corner of their minds.”
COLONY will be released in the U.S. August 28 by Well Go USA, which is also bringing a 4K rerelease of TRAIN TO BUSAN to theaters August 14. For more on the New York Asian Film Festival, head over to its official website.
