Colony
2018 · 14m · Australia
Directed by Catherine Bonny
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
In the year 2131, sisters Rhian and Seren take a five-year terraforming contract on a hostile alien world in exchange for promised land. When Rhian discovers a sinister creature in the planet's ocean, it offers her a way to save her dying sister at a terrifying cost.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally—someone took the alien colonization setup seriously enough to let it *rot* into something genuinely unsettling, refusing the usual sci-fi heroics for a creature that doesn't negotiate with your expectations. The fact that salvation and damnation look identical here is exactly the kind of premise that makes consensus critics nervous, and that's precisely why it works.
Bonny's restraint in staging the horror against that flattened Australian terrain recalls the formal severity of New Wave SF cinema, where landscape becomes protagonist; the editing between intimate sister-dialogue and cosmic dread demonstrates a considered understanding of pacing that situates this firmly in the lineage of Tarkovsky's planetary meditations.
The single choice to keep the creature's offer ambiguous—never quite showing us what salvation looks like—transforms a modest budget into something that feels purposefully made rather than constrained, and that refusal to resolve the moral calculus is what elevates the entire piece from premise into genuine cinema.
Reviews
The writing in COLONY was used to its full effect with a cast of great actors giving great performances.
Colony has a few good ideas but the execution feels very thrown together.
Festivals
- Final Girls Berlin Film Festival 2018