Colony      Director: Yeon Sang-ho Cert: 16Genre: HorrorStarring: Jun Ji-hyun, Koo Kyo-hwan, Ji Chang-wook, Kim Shin-rok, Shin Hyun-been, Go Soo Running Time: 2 hrs 3 minsJust when you think the zombie movie is dead – or too long undead – Yeon Sang-ho, director of The King of Pigs, returns to the genre with Colony, a propulsive thriller channelling the claustrophobia of his 2016 hit Train to Busan into a fancy shopping mall. The late George Romero would appreciate the shiny, capitalist skyscraper where the zombies run riot. The change of setting gives the director plenty of room to play with his visual instincts: luxury outlets, corridors and postmodern architecture become tight spaces for increasingly inventive eruptions of violence.The zombies are from the fleet-footed school of Carnival of Souls and 28 Days Later. The premise is introduced with similar urgency. A disgruntled former biotech researcher unleashes a virus that turns its victims into contorting, ravenous monsters.Koo Kyo-hwan, star of the Netlix military drama DP, brings a convincingly volatile presence to the film’s deranged, Dr No-sized antagonist. With the complex sealed off by overly eager police, a disparate group of survivors must find the infected man, whose antibodies supposedly hold the key to stopping the outbreak. The most interesting survivors include the prickly academic Se-jeong (energetically played by Gianna Jun), who nurses a complicated relationship with her ex-husband. Ji Chang-wook makes an impression as a caring security guard who protects and carries his wheelchair-using, IT-whizz sister (Kim Shin-rok).The rest is often noise. These humans are far less fun than the creatures. The movement director Jeon Young, working with professional contemporary dancers alongside traditional stunt actors, helps to realise zombies that evolve in intellect through group exchanges that appear as absence seizures. Their collective intelligence, adapting instinctively to their prey, adds an appealing twist: survival depends not merely on outrunning the horde but also on out-Darwining the hunters. Working with the cinematographer Byun Bong-sung, Yeon’s anime background looms large in the precision of high-octane sequences and the frame-friendly hive-mind choreography of bodies in motion. That ceaseless kinetic quality makes for a hugely entertaining addition to Yeon’s increasingly distinctive horror universe.In cinemas from Friday, August 28th