The zombie, as a cinematic creature, has always been a mirror. George Romero pointed it at consumerism; Danny Boyle at rage itself; Yeon Sang-ho, in his breakthrough 2016 film Train to Busan, at class stratification and the hollow promises of Korean capitalism. Now, with Colony premiering in Cannes' Midnight Screenings section, Yeon has found a new target: the creeping erasure of individuality in an age of algorithmic optimization.
The film imagines a near-future where a pandemic—not of disease, but of networked consciousness—transforms the infected into something worse than mindless. They become perfectly efficient, perfectly coordinated, perfectly stripped of selfhood. It is not subtle. It does not need to be.
The AI anxiety no one wants to name
Hollywood has spent the past three years dancing around artificial intelligence, unsure whether to celebrate it, fear it, or simply monetize it. Yeon has no such hesitation. In interviews at Cannes, he has been blunt about Colony's thesis: that the real danger of AI is not superintelligence or robot uprisings, but the slow, voluntary surrender of human judgment to systems that optimize for outcomes we never chose.
The zombies in Colony do not shamble. They move with eerie synchronization, a hive mind that has solved the coordination problems that plague human societies. They are, in Yeon's telling, what we might become if we let convenience win. The horror is not that they want to eat us. The horror is that they seem happier.
Why the zombie genre refuses to die
Critics have been pronouncing the zombie film dead for two decades, and yet it keeps lurching back. The reason is structural: zombies are infinitely adaptable metaphors, empty vessels that can be filled with whatever anxiety defines the moment. In the 2000s, it was terrorism and pandemic. In the 2010s, it was economic collapse and social fragmentation. Now, in the mid-2020s, it is the question of what happens when machines can do everything we do, only better.
Yeon understands this malleability better than most. Train to Busan worked because it was not really about zombies; it was about a workaholic father learning to be present. Colony, by early accounts, operates the same way—using genre machinery to smuggle in questions about autonomy, creativity, and whether resistance to optimization is noble or merely nostalgic.
Cannes as cultural barometer
That Colony landed in Midnight Screenings rather than Competition says something about the festival's lingering snobbery toward genre, but also about Yeon's own positioning. He has never sought the art-house validation that might come with a slower, more austere approach. His films are visceral, commercial, designed to work on audiences who have never heard of Cannes. This is not a criticism. It is, arguably, what makes his ideas land.
The Croisette audience reportedly responded with sustained applause, though the film's bleakness—it does not offer easy catharsis—left some viewers unsettled. Good. Unsettled is the appropriate response to a film asking whether we are already halfway to becoming what Yeon depicts.
Our take
Yeon Sang-ho has made a career of wrapping social critique in genre packaging that actually sells tickets, and Colony appears to be his most ambitious attempt yet. The AI conversation has been dominated by tech optimists and doomsayers trading white papers; what it has lacked is a popular artist willing to dramatize the quieter, more insidious fear—that we might not be replaced by machines, but simply absorbed into them, one convenience at a time. If Colony works, it will be because Yeon has found the image for that anxiety: a zombie that does not want your flesh, just your selfhood. That is scarier than any apocalypse.
