Cannes 2026: Colony, a Die Hard among zombies

The director of Last Train to Busan returns to Cannes with a clever zombie film. Colony mixes Romero and McT in a Seoul tower.

Obviously the festival has decided to please the night owls this year. After Sanguine yesterday and before Jim Queen who should set the fire tomorrow evening, Colony arrives between the two and confirms that the Midnight Sessions are among the most exciting selections of the 2026 vintage. And then… seeing zombies again on the Croisette, that’s always nice, right?

Besides, on this subject, did you really think you had seen it all? Since Romero locked his survivors in the mall of Zombiewe were treated to Boyle’s sprinters, to the industrial hordes of World War Zor to the long-distance walkers of the Walking Dead. The genre has become so diluted that there isn’t much left to sink your teeth into. Even South Korea got in on the act with Last Train to Busanvery effective, but which still stuck too closely to the specifications: survive in a confined space, run very fast, and avoid bites.

And so Yeon Sang-ho (director of Busan precisely) comes back with a proposal that dusts off the formula. Colony traps its characters in a Seoul tech skyscraper. A scientific conference turns into carnage and the survivors will have to play a bloody game of chess. It is Die Hard who meets Zombiewith infected people no longer just biting stupidly. Here they learn. They first crawl like animals, then coordinate and organize themselves into collective intelligence. Yeon Sang-ho films it like a horrific ballet and transforms the action into a strategic duel. Jun Ji-hyun (the Sassy Girl is back) is a biologist who will have to deal with her ex and a worrying researcher (Koo Kyo-hwan). Above all, she will have to anticipate the reactions of predators.

But what is striking beyond the mechanics is the idea that permeates the entire film. Yeon Sang-ho takes a directly political reading of the genre – he told us himself: his zombies are ChatGPT. A mass that thinks in unison, that produces uniform responses, that absorbs individuals until they disappear. Faced with this, two heroines refuse to blend into the group. The director of Busan ten years ago made the film of collective solidarity against selfishness; he returns with his exact reverse shot. Colony is a film about the individual, about resistance to formatting, about the need for minority voices in the age of AI.

And he has the intelligence to slip all that into a pure genre film, exhilarating and spectacular. In short: it gives us something to wait for, while waiting for the real Korean piece of the edition – the return of Na Hong-jin with Hopeten years later The Strangers. This night Colony has achieved a little tour de force: bringing a breath of fresh air to the zombie film, and mixing politics and entertainment.