Probably the most powerful image in Danny Boyle’s seminal zombie film 28 Days Later was that of a lone man dwarfed against an empty London. One of the most bustling thoroughfares in the world, the sight of it quiet and abandoned was disarming and haunting. You were prompted to wonder what seismic thing could have happened to cause such a bewildering phenomenon.
That was in 2002. By 2025, we have seen London empty in nearly the same state as Boyle depicted twenty-three (a few years shy of twenty-eight) years ago. That calibre of apocalyptic imagery has become distinctly tangible, even if the nature of its effects have not -and it has been a sobering thing. Really, that is the key difference between 28 Days Later and 28 Years Later.
Behind the scenes there really aren’t so many. Not only has Boyle come back (marking also his first movie as director in seven years), but Alex Garland, whose own filmmaking career arguably stems from the success of his screenplay for 28 Days Later, has returned to write it. Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, who shot much of the original film on a Canon portable digital camera, reprises that approach with a modern iPhone, and even Cillian Murphy -for whom the first film was his breakout- is present again in a producing role. Yet none of these people are in the same place or have the same perspective as they did then -this movie is invariably another beast, albeit still a deadly one.
While the previous films examined a world gripped only recently by the chaos and confusion of a sudden apocalypse, 28 Years Later depicts a society that is embedded within that framework. The world before the Rage Virus of 2002 is hardly remembered -at least in the U.K., where the virus has been successfully contained to -Britain and Ireland being put under quarantine while the rest of the world has moved on. Though the state of survivors on the mainland is unknown, a pocket of civilization has survived on Holy Island, a fortified tidal island off the coast of Northumberland, accessible only occasionally by a causeway. There, a boy called Spike (Alfie Williams) is taken to the mainland by his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), to hunt infected as a rite of passage, though Spike’s only real passion is for his mother Isla (Jodie Comer) and curing her of the mysterious ailment that threatens her life. Ultimately, he ventures out with her alone for this express purpose.
The momentum of 28 Years Later is more relaxed than either of its predecessors. It’s certainly not wanting for scenes of zombie mayhem, but it is a quieter melancholy movie that settles well in an atmosphere of emptiness and loss. The whole of Britain that we see in the film is haunted, and through the perspective of Spike -born into this world- the sense of what was is felt as a distant mysterious echo. The emptiness is decidedly more sombre here than it was in the original film, because Garland and Boyle have a more mature understanding of the numbing state of apocalypse, of an air of death and despair. They like the rest of us experienced a crash-course in it.
If the earlier movies were responses politically (as all zombie movies are) to early 2000s western tensions and the War on Terror, this movie coming in the aftermath of COVID, is a reckoning with the world that has been changed by the pandemic. In some ways it has been subtle, in others more drastic, but there has been a paradigm shift in the 2020s, a sense of enormous collective loss -of people of course, which this movie alludes to notably in the immense, sobering shrine to the dead constructed by the mainland survivor Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), a vilified eccentric who worships memento mori- but also a loss of energy and habit and time. We all feel those missing years -kids who are Spike’s age especially, whose worldview has been shaped by that experience in a way that we are only beginning to learn how to process. Boyle keeps the focus with Spike and the curious effect this reality has had on him, in which the world is an inherently hazardous place and his reference point of culture is extremely homogenized and in many ways artificial.
It is a mock-up of British culture in isolation, his home on Holy Island -agrarian and with a warrior-class mentality that has arisen in a space without laws or government. For Isla, their access to medical information is extremely limited, and not knowing the details of her condition, the townsfolk and even her husband seem content to just let her die of it. And there is seemingly no interest in building back a better civilization, even as it is known that there is a thriving world outside the quarantined isle -as we see explicitly later when a Swedish soldier (Edvin Ryding) becomes stranded and references all sorts of modern staples that never made their way to Britain. The U.K. has been abandoned by the global community and it’s not hard to see the parallels of the impact of Brexit here -and though in this case there was no disastrous choice made by the people, the deluded isolationism of those we do meet is very familiar. The people on Holy Island still keep a picture of the Queen. There are ways they try to keep up their Britishness, something Boyle alludes to remarkably through juxtaposing their form of militarism with footage of Second World War British propaganda, including quite curiously scenes of Laurence Olivier’s 1944 Henry V, with aesthetics Boyle replicates in his culture here -in one montage dismally underscored by a 1915 dramatic recitation of Rudyard Kipling’s psychological war poem “Boots”, which sets a tone of horror better than anything else in the movie whilst hammering home an eerie sense of futile nationalism.
Meanwhile the zombies themselves have evolved into their own kind of social infrastructure over the decades; while still being the carnage monsters that they were in the older films, complete with red eyes and vomiting blood, they are now stratified among the classic runners, obese crawlers, and tall athletic Alphas. They are also uniformly naked, likening them further to wild beasts -and yet there remains something innately, uncomfortably human about them, something Garland and Boyle are keen to explore by one shocking late development that threatens to unravel this world. But while the zombies are more complex they remain terrifying, and though Boyle hasn't made a horror movie since the original he still has an effective technical grasp of the genre. The low-fi look of the original film is not an option, but Boyle's signature slap-dash editing style makes a welcome return, implying momentum while not confounding the visuals. There is a focus, particularly in the Alpha, at odds with those meandering hordes of previous films, that intensifies gripping scenes like a chase on the causeway at low tide or an Alien-like stalking through an abandoned train.
Williams does a superb job serving as the centrepiece of the film, capturing that conviction beyond his years yet perfectly juvenile naivety and need to prove himself. We watch him find an equilibrium in this frightening reality -though fearing for his life, he is paradoxically more comfortable on the mainland than in his home. Comer is the real scene-stealer though, playing exceptionally a concoction of confusion, weariness, passion, and fortitude. Her impact on her son is deeply felt and her response to the zombies is one of a wary openness -in some ways she relates to their motivations of instinct, she herself being not altogether. And Fiennes is worth acknowledging for a performance of equal parts silliness and convincing gravitas. A curious man at peace in his devotion to death, both perturbing and in a fascinating way, cathartic. Again, a byproduct I think of the environment this movie has come in the aftermath of.
28 Years Later is a movie that sharply resonates with its time. And it's only a shame that we aren't able just yet to see where it is going. Because 28 Years Later is yet another half-movie, ending at a point that connects to its intriguing prologue but won't be expanded on until 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple early next year, to be directed by Nia DaCosta. Given the promise of the trajectory the movie was on, its lack of closure is a disappointment -this trend not one that feels worthwhile cinematically. But the movie is still thrillingly interesting, engaging, and provocative, and the hints from where it ends only makes it more so. 28 Days Later reinvented the zombie genre, and this decades-later sequel may have done so again.
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