Yeon Sang-ho’s “Colony” premiered within the Midnight Screenings part on the Cannes Film Festival on Friday, marking the “Train to Busan” director’s return to the zombie style. This time, he infuses it a distinctly up to date twist that displays anxieties about synthetic intelligence, collective conduct and the erosion of human individuality.
“All along my works, I always tried to express the fear or the horror of today’s society,” Yeon tells Selection. “For me, the greatest fear is the high-speed communication exchange. It’s like a living organism and, in a way, it reduces our individualism, our individuality.”
That thematic concern drives “Colony,” which follows biotechnology professor Se-jeong, performed by Gianna Jun, as she attends a convention that spirals into disaster when a quickly mutating virus is unleashed. With authorities sealing off the whole facility, survivors discover themselves trapped with an ever-growing menace that behaves much less like conventional zombies and extra like a networked intelligence.
For Yeon, the choice to revisit zombies wasn’t about retreading acquainted floor however discovering the correct vessel for exploring fashionable anxieties. He factors to George A. Romero’s enduring affect, noting that “Night of the Living Dead” and subsequent zombie movies stay beloved as a result of Romero was capable of specific the potential concern of his time by means of the undead.
“When you see the history of those zombie movies, actually zombies represent the fear of that time, so it’s really, really relevant,” Yeon says. “And zombies, even in my movies, they are called zombies because it’s not a definition, but it’s because they represent the potential fear of our time.”
That concern, in 2026, facilities on how speedy info change and synthetic intelligence are reshaping human thought into one thing collective and homogenized. “In a way, it’s like a living organism,” Yeon observes, “and it reduces our individualism, our individuality.”
The filmmaker’s analysis into viral colonies and group organisms revealed an interesting parallel to human society. “Each colony or each group, each virus — we can just assume that there’s only one specificity — but actually, even if they appear to be the same, themselves they create a mutant,” he explains. “Because if they are all the same, if something happens to this particular organism or this virus, it’s a weak point because this weakness can lead to complete extinction.”
That organic crucial towards variety informs Yeon’s broader philosophy about defending minority voices inside collective constructions. “I think the human society can learn a lot about this because actually, it’s also for us very important to protect the minority in front of the universality.”
Yeon’s considerations about collective conduct lengthen on to synthetic intelligence itself. “We have to look into what are the specificities of AI,” he says. “Of course, it’s an artificial intelligence and it’s the sum of all that is universal. So when we speak about universality, it also embraces errors or bugs which is, in a way, the point of view of the minority which is completely buried in it.”
For Yeon, AI’s means to quickly discover and synthesize common opinions creates a elementary downside: it eliminates the mutations and minority views that organic programs — and human societies — must survive. “AI is appropriate for creating universal opinions, but it has limitations in creating mutations, which are characteristics of living organisms — minority opinions,” he explains.
“Train to Busan” trapped its characters within the horizontal area of a dashing prepare, however “Colony” unfolds vertically inside a sealed high-rise constructing. The shift isn’t merely spatial however symbolic, representing what Yeon sees because the precariousness of human civilization itself.
“When you have vertical action, it also expresses that the civilization made by humans can also go back very quickly to the primitive, to the savageness that we all knew before,” he says. The verticality additionally performs with viewers expectations about escape and survival. “Humans think that you better go up, upwards to survive, but actually in the movie, you know that it doesn’t really help to go on the top.”
The setting additionally allowed Yeon to discover a dimension absent from “Train to Busan” — the angle of these exterior who view containment as vital. “There are people outside who want people inside to be completely locked down, isolated,” he notes. “That is the biggest difference compared to ‘Train to Busan’.”
It’s an method knowledgeable by the worldwide expertise of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We all experienced the coronavirus experience since then,” Yeon observes. “I think we all have a way of watching that completely changed because of that experience.”
In an period when visible results can conjure nearly something, Yeon made the deliberate option to floor “Colony’s” horror in bodily efficiency. He employed three groups {of professional} dancers to embody the contaminated, rejecting the notion that creatures sharing a collective consciousness ought to transfer identically.
“I’m not struggling to avoid any CGI, but here it was the case because we have actual real living organisms,” Yeon explains. “Of course, they have all the specificities of AI, those zombies, but those living organisms, I wanted them to be real.”
The metaphor he used with the dancers was telling: “Ten fingers of one hand playing a piano. So each of them, they are in one hand, so they are a body, but each of them have their specific role.” It’s a choreographic method that mirrors the movie’s thematic curiosity in how people perform inside collectives whereas sustaining distinct identities.
“Colony”
Showbox
Balancing blockbuster spectacle with philosophical inquiry comes naturally to Yeon, however he’s fast to credit score the infrastructure created by Korea’s earlier era of filmmakers.
“I think everything is really due to the industry of South Korean cinema,” he says. “You see recently all those famous directors like Lee Chang-dong, Bong Joon Ho, Park Chan-wook — we really owe them a lot because they are the ones who made the basic frame of doing movies that are at the same time commercial but also very auteur.”
That framework, Yeon says, distinguishes Korean business cinema from different markets. “It’s like a really cornerstone — so we all try to not only make pure commercial films, but commercial films which also embrace auteur side. So that, I think, is one of the greatest strengths of Korean cinema.”
The worldwide success of Korean style filmmaking has opened new collaborative alternatives for Yeon. His Netflix thriller “Revelations” featured Alfonso Cuarón as producer, whereas his Netflix Japan sequence “Human Vapor,” directed by Katayama Shinzo, launches July 2. The sequence, impressed by a Sixties movie and Okuda Hideo’s novel “Olympic Ransom,” allowed Yeon to work in unfamiliar cultural terrain.
“The subject takes place in a country that I don’t know, it’s not my usual surroundings, so it was great to collaborate on that project,” he says.
Yeon is finishing post-production on “Paradise Lost,” a darker, extra intimate undertaking that extends themes from his 2025 movie “The Ugly.” Impressed by low-budget works from Asian masters like Edward Yang and Kurosawa Kiyoshi, “Paradise Lost” tells the story of a mom who makes use of AI companies to nearly resurrect her lifeless younger son, solely to have her precise son return 9 years later.
“It’s a very dark movie and it’s really completely different to the big movies that I usually make,” Yeon says. “But I don’t want to focus on only one kind of movie; I really want to have a parallel, to make both independent low-budget movies and also all those commercial movies together.”
Trying additional forward, Yeon hints at a global undertaking that may take him exterior Korean-language cinema fully, although he’s staying tight-lipped on particulars.
For now, his focus stays on “Colony’s” Cannes debut, the place he and his solid — together with Jun, Koo Kyo-hwan, Ji Chang-wook, Shin Hyun-been, and Kim Shin-rock — walked the purple carpet Friday evening. It’s a second that encapsulates how far Korean style cinema has traveled on the worldwide stage, and the way filmmakers like Yeon proceed to seek out contemporary resonance in acquainted varieties.
“I think that I’m really lucky to be a director working today,” Yeon displays, evaluating the present debates about streaming platforms, AI, and cinema’s identification to the inventive ferment that adopted Marcel Duchamp’s Dadaism. “All those debates actually enriched art at that time. So I think today it’s the same for cinema because of the platforms, because of the quest of identity, everything enriches cinema today.”
