Director Yeon Sang-ho's new film "Cluster," which drew a 7-minute standing ovation at this year's Cannes Film Festival Midnight Screening, was unveiled in Korea for the first time at a press preview on the 20th. With evolved zombies and a chilling allegory, Yeon has demonstrated the overwhelming achievement that even Cannes admired, simultaneously delivering genre thrills and weighty contemporary themes that critics say further expand the universe of K-zombie films. Ten years after "Train to Busan" drew 10 million viewers and felt fresh at the time, the zombie genre had grown somewhat stale — but Yeon has now signaled a complete "evolution" by threading contemporary issues such as artificial intelligence (AI) through the genre.
The film unfolds at a brisk pace, set in the Dungwoori Building in the heart of downtown Seoul. After biology PhD Seo Yeong-cheol (Koo Kyo-hwan) carries out an indiscriminate biological terror attack and infects conference attendees, the people inside the building rapidly turn into zombies. Bioengineering professor Kwon Se-jeong (Jun Ji-hyun), building security team member Choi Hyun-seok (Ji Chang-wook), his older sister Choi Hyun-hee (Kim Shin-rok), and Se-jeong's ex-husband Han Gyu-seong (Go Soo) find themselves in a desperate crisis, forced to break through hordes of zombies to escape from the locked-down chaos of the building.
With even the government abandoning rescue operations and the survivors left isolated, their first task is to identify the zombies' behavioral patterns and exploit their weaknesses. Realizing that the zombies blindly charge at anything resembling a human, the survivors try to escape the crisis by using human-shaped standees inside the building. Just as they appear to be eluding the zombies easily, the film veers in an unexpected direction, ratcheting up the immersion. The zombies in the Dungwoori Building begin to receive new information in real time — an "update."
A Yeon-iverse Allegory Targeting the Fears of the AI Era
Monkey Creatures and Zombies as a Visual Highlight
And a Chilling Metaphor for "New Totalitarianism"
The monkey creatures that appear in "Cluster" deliver a creative and fresh visual shock, while at the same time posing profound questions about human nature. The human zombies, who exchange intelligence with the monkeys in real time, initially crawl grotesquely on all fours, but as their intelligence is updated, they gradually rise onto two legs. In particular, the scene in which the infected, as if performing synchronized mass games or gymnastics, all suddenly raise their heads in unison is the visual highlight of "Cluster" and a chilling metaphor for the "new totalitarianism" of a world overwhelmed by AI and stripped of diversity.
Yeon's choice to place the monkey at the heart of the creature design is also highly symbolic from an evolutionary perspective. It directly subverts the scientific origin story of how humans evolved from primates, stood on two legs, used tools and built civilization. The grotesque process by which the film's zombies update their intelligence and shift from quadrupedal to bipedal locomotion paradoxically replays humanity's "history of evolution" through the catastrophe of a zombie virus, in an extremely fast and grotesque manner, delivering a fundamental sense of dread to the audience.
The image of bodies stripped of individuality, dominated by a single massive will and moving in lockstep, mirrors the totalitarianism of the past, which oozed madness while steeped in collective thinking. Through the creature of a primate (monkey) that has grown smarter than humans, Yeon delivers a scathing allegory of modern people who, trapped in the universal algorithms driven by AI and social networking services (SNS), lose the power to think for themselves and become uniform.
Like Yeon Sang-ho's previous works, "Cluster" fully retains the signature "Yeon-iverse" palette — a cynical view of humanity, character relationships that can feel somewhat schematic, and cartoonish situational setups in which emotional surges trump plausibility. Yet what makes the film hit so hard is that this Yeon-style grammar is perfectly fused with a sharp awareness of contemporary social issues.
At a press conference held after the press preview, Yeon explained, "As I dug into the operating principles of AI, it began to feel like 'the sum of universal thought.'" He added, "I combined zombies with the fear of an era in which universal thinking and ultra-high-speed information exchange grow so bloated that the individuality of each human is rendered powerless." The realistic fear that only the efficiency and universal knowledge dictated by the system will survive in the future — and that the moment a human submits to that collective intelligence, they degenerate into something non-human — delivers a chilling sensation.
Perfect Synergy Among Actors Who Inspire Trust by Name Alone
The actors' overwhelming ensemble is another major pillar of the film. Jun Ji-hyun, returning to the big screen for the first time in 11 years since "Assassination," firmly anchors the center of the drama. Jun explained, "I focused on making the audience think alongside Se-jeong and follow the situation naturally." Critics praise her restrained performance, in which — befitting a character set up as a bioengineering PhD — she does not suddenly turn into an action hero but instead cleverly navigates her way out of crises.
Koo Kyo-hwan, who plays the most intense villain in the drama, unpacks the psychology of a character that could easily have been overplayed through his trademark delicate acting. Drawing inspiration from the gestures of the actors playing zombies, he calculated even the slightest hand movements, tiny tremors of facial muscles and brief blinks, delivering an overwhelming presence.
Ji Chang-wook, who plays security team member Choi Hyun-seok struggling for survival while carrying his older sister Choi Hyun-hee (Kim Shin-rok) on his back, does not lose emotional depth even amid physical exhaustion. Kim Shin-rok also expresses the tender backstory of the siblings beyond the dialogue through intuitive physical interaction, heightening the film's emotional intensity. Shin Hyun-been's performance, in which she said she worked to balance the rationality of an outside expert trying to solve the incident with her private family history, also adds to the film's persuasiveness.
"Cluster" is more than a simple entertainment film — it is a clever genre piece that questions the "individuality of humans" rendered powerless amid technological progress and asks "what it means to be human." Audiences who let their guard down in their seats may find themselves overcome by an astonishing terror, as if the director's piercing gaze were tearing into their entire bodies. Opens on the 21st.
