Two by Yeon Sang-ho: Colony and Paradise Lost

Since I logged an entry for Colony while at Fantasia (see the last entry on hitting a posting wall), Yeon Snag-ho has actually had three movies in American theaters: A tenth-anniversary reissue of Train to Busan, Colony, and now Paradise Lost, although I feel like they only really had enough showtimes for one between them: Train to Busan played a couple shows a day, maybe, at Boston Common; Colony played there, South Bay, and Assembly Row, but mostly 10pm shows, and now (if you're reading this on 11 November) Paradise Lost has one show at 7:15 daily at Causeway Street. Colony, it seems, got kind of a rough draw - it played North America three months after its Korean release, which put it close to the much quicker release of Hope, and I wonder if the folks booking theaters worried that the "okay" Korean action-horror movie just a couple weeks before the downright great one might make them run together for some folks and hurt the one with higher potential.

He's been surprisingly busy for the last few years, though we haven't seen anything in Boston-area theaters since Train to Busan: Peninsula back in 2020, he's had two Netflix series, two films for the service, and a low-budget feature that didn't play Boston. I'm aware I'm an anomaly as a movie guy who doesn't subscribe to Netflix, but I do kind of wonder whether that's more or less prominent than a theatrical release these days. What's notable is that four films as writer/director in two years seems like a lot - even indie authors not named Hong Sang-soo generally find equilibrium at one - and maybe the execution winds up suffering a bit. Colony often looks okay when it could look great, and Paradise Lost really could have used work all over.

Still, Colony is at least worth a look and has already had a 4K disc announced. I can't really fault someone who wants to get stuff out there, but it's apparently starting to take a bit of a toll.


Gunche (Colony)

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon

As much as I kind of miss when Yeon Sang-ho made grim animated movies instead of zombie blockbusters, Colony is a rip-roarer, getting down to business pretty quick and offering up a different-enough take on the material that it feels much less like you're just seeing the standard bits repeated again. It's not far from what has worked for him before, but enough to make it fun.

It kicks off with scientist Seo Young-cheol (Koo Kyo-hwan) calling police to report a situation in a new high-rise, one that he's about to cause, before introducing the audience to Kwan Se-jeong (Gianna Jun Ji-hyun), an abrasive biologist whose long-remarried ex-husband Han Kyu-seong (Go Soo) nevertheless retains a soft spot for her, bringing Se-jeong to a biotech firm's keynote to introduce her to the company's CEO Kang Woo-cheol (Kim Jong-tae). Sadly, and disastrously, their meeting is interrupted by Young-cheol, who accuses Woo-cheol of stealing his work and injects him with a virus. At that point, it's outbreak time, albeit with a twist, as the feral victims seem to be forming a hive mind. Se-jeong and Kyu-seong wind up forming a group with security guard Choi Hyun-seok (Ji Chang-wook), his wheelchair-using sister Hyun-hee (Kim Shin-rock), cop Lee Bong-seok (Lee Joong-ok), bullied teenager Lee So-eun (Lee Dam-hee), and others as the building is quarantined, with bioterrorism expert Kong Seol-hee (Shin Hyun-been) - Kyu-seong's second wife, because apparently the bioengineering community is Seoul is tight-knit - investigating Young-cheol's lab in hopes of finding a way to stop the contagion from spreading.

Zombie films are a somewhat disreputable genre for obvious reasons, but have often managed to retain a place in the zeitgeist because, from the start, they've often been able to use the specter of facing a horde as not just a set-up for daunting set pieces but a metaphor for any case where it feels like good people are opposed by the whole mindless world, on top of offering up the melodrama of a loved one who has turned (cliché a it has become). Colony, to be blunt, is not that kind of movie; it's basically an inch deep in a way that may seem disappointing if you see the early scenes in a shopping mall and think you're getting Dawn of the Dead. This is more problem-solving than allegory by a long shot, far more akin to a video game or escape room where Se-jeong and company have to clear various stages than any sort of allegory for top-down organizations or ethics in the life sciences.

It's pretty darn good problem-solving for the first half or so, as the characters learn a new set of rules and the situation is fluid enough that the same thing is not likely to work twice, so the film never gets stuck in blasting-away mode. Yeon stages all of that well and enhances it with the weird ways the infected move to start with, and the film is full of fun goop as this building becomes a formicary as the likable core group tries to escape. Characters rub each other the wrong way but it's mostly flavor to how they're trying to get out, but Yeon also makes the occasional swing to realign in ways which sometimes feel stupidly selfish but maybe work with everyone stressed.

It could look better, I suppose; for all that Yeon has done weird imagery to spare, the visual style is kind of flat, like he's a guy who can make cool things but has a harder time making things cool, at least on this budget. Released as it is near Hope, one can see how both deal with pushing up against the capacity of their budget; Hope has occasionally weak CGI but gambles that looking cool is more important than looking photorealistic, while Colony opts against striking mutations or atmospheric lighting to just get the thing done. It's not a bad decision, but it's a notable contrast if one remembers Yeon's early animated work: They were often notably ugly in ways that enhanced the emotion, where a lot of his live-action work, including Colony, is visually capable but not so obviously the work of the auteur Yeon seemed to be at the start of his career.

At least, not until the finale, which is a striking image and callback and might have a little more to it if you're inclined to maybe look deeper than it is. At the very least, Colony is a take on zombie-virus movies that at least tries to do something new, even if it's not exactly saying anything new.


Sillagwon (Paradise Lost '26)

☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 November 2026 in AMC Causeway Street #5 (first-run, laser DCP)

As mentioned above, I'm kind of shocked by just how prolific Yeon Sang-ho has been over the past few years, since his Netflix work doesn't register with me, but now I'm starting to wonder if he could do with slowing down some. It hasn't been long since Colony, and this movie really could have used some more time to develop. It's a mess where one can see how the pieces sort of go together, but don't fit together, enough to make me wonder if the original novel was a similar mess or if it was the adaptation.

It opens with single mom Ryu So-young (Kim Hyun-joo) loading son Sun-woo (Yu Ji-wan) on a bus for "camping school", not aware it would be the last time she, or any of the other parents, saw him alive, though only a few of the bodies were found. Artificial Intelligence firm TransHuman steps in to offer the grieving parents augmented-reality recreations of the missing children. Nine years later, So-young is probably the one connecting to their still-pre-teen avatar the most, but is about to receive a shock, as a young man (Bae Hyeon-seong) has just shown up at the police station, where they've already run DNA tests to determine that, yes, he is Sun-woo, before informing So-young. Reconnecting is difficult to start with, even before the arrival of Oh Gyeong-won (Lee Hyun-kyun), a reporter who has been pulled away from filing a report on a serial killer because Sun-woo's reappearance is the biggest local news story in years, and something seems a bit off in both cases.

The initial slow-burn stage of a thriller can occasionally be tricky for filmmakers to negotiate, as they try to build a seemingly placid environment despite the audience knowing what genre of film they for which they bought a ticket, especially in something like Paradise Lost that has these futuristic elements that one needs to be brought up to speed on. It's probably the main place Yeon really stumbles badly: The opening is a lot of exposition delivered via news reports and scenes with So-young that don't quite tell the audience enough about her before Sun-woo reappears. Starting at that point, though, I'm saying to slow down and let the unease of a situation develop rather than just rushing into it; things move too fast to let a viewer feel a certain way before it's twisted.

Not that it necessarily helps, since a lot of the premise is just dumb to start with, especially the whole AI company plot which seems to ignore what's genuinely problematic about these sort of simulations and could make for some sharp satire (what if reading to these "kids" is feeding them training data, or how even much less sophisticated chatbots are addictive in real life) in order to imply that these are basically people with emotions and desires. That used to be interesting science fiction, but it misses the point these days. The intersection of the plots sounds clever, and the characters laying it out think they're clever, but it's really, really not. There are twists, but they're predictable twists given the setup; even when things are fleshed out so little that what happens might as well be random, it's not surprising.

The cast at least performs these stock characters in a nonsensical plot well enough; Kim Hyun-joo bounces between So-young being kind of oblivious to how weird her obsession with her AI son is and wailing in a way that's big and eye-rolling but not the actress's fault; Bae Hyun-seong dives into being unnerving without subtlety because there's no point where the audience is meant to wonder how he'll jump. Lee Hyun-kyun 's reporter is a cynical journalist archetype, but that fits. In some ways, Yu Ji-wan is the most interesting performance in retrospect, making the original Sun-woo a bit of an eye-rolling brat embarrassed by him doting mother in a way that allows the AI version to scan as possibly manipulative on top of being afraid of deletion and planting a seed for what the adult has become.

They're not enough to salvage a movie where the filmmakers never quite seem to get their finger on what makes this story interesting, even beyond how it arrives at a moment where audiences may be skeptical of its AI subplot. All in all, a tremendous disappointment from a filmmaker who really used to be able to put an audience through a wringer.