28 Years Later
Danny Boyle and Alex Garland return to the zombie apocalypse all these years later to add another layer of profundity to the franchise.
Memento mori: Jodie Comer and Alfie Williams
Photo by Miya Mizuno, courtesy of Columbia Pictures.
A lot can happen in 28 years. Luckily, Danny Boyle, who directed 28 Days Later (2002), is still with us and has lost none of his madness nor his directorial flair. The first chapter in the franchise took the zombie apocalypse to a whole new level, with Cillian Murphy wandering the spookily empty streets of London. It suggested that all sorts of things can happen when scientists experiment with animals in secret laboratories. The third chapter in the franchise is so much more than a zombie film, being an exploration of mortality, survival, manhood, betrayal, disease and Brexit, as well as a brutal rites-of-passage.
With the British mainland completely ravaged by the Rage virus, the infected have evolved into different types, while the island has been annexed from Europe and the EU. On Lindisfarne (aka the Holy Island), an island off the northeast coast of England, a community has combined forces to return to the practical skills of their ancestors, where a young warrior’s most valuable tools are a torch, knife, whistle, water bottle and bow and arrow. Our protagonist is Spike (Alfie Williams) who, at twelve, is ready to experience the joys of manhood by visiting the mainland for the first time, a place so vast that there are spaces where you can no longer see the sea. Spike’s father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), is keen for his son to learn to defend himself against the infected and to inure him to the sight of blood, skulls and intestines. Spike’s mother Isla (Jodie Comer) is not much help, being laid up in bed with a very serious malady and forgetting which day it is.
Danny Boyle is a really fine filmmaker and the opening of his new film (following a hiatus of six years) is a verification of that. A group of young children are crowded around a TV set watching the Teletubbies, a surreal experience that does little to calm their frazzled nerves. Then, in the next few minutes, Boyle lays on the old ultra violence with pizzazz as a young boy, Jimmy (Robert Rhodes), witnesses both his mother and his father eviscerated by screaming zombies – before disappearing into the next chapter in the franchise (Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple), played by Jack O’Connell.
We then jump forward twenty-eight years. Spike is a wonderful creation, representing a child of the future for whom such words as “online” mean nothing. When he is shown an image of a “beautiful woman” on a now superfluous mobile phone, he wonders what is wrong with her, suspecting that her voluptuous facial features are the result of an unfortunate reaction to shellfish.
As imaginative as a sequel can be, 28 Years Later prompts comparisons to The Wicker Man, A Quiet Place and the oeuvre of Ben Wheatley, although its contemplation of mortality is all its own. As Antony Gormley’s proud statue Angel of the North rises up above an overgrown landscape, it stands for the inescapable power of the future. Sadly, two shots of the iconic Sycamore Gap next to Hadrian’s Wall can but be a testament to the criminal vandalism that felled the tree in 2023 (on 28 September, as it happens), a socio-political commentary added by Danny Boyle with a sardonic wink.
Turning up in the last third of the movie, Ralph Fiennes adds belated gravitas as a shaman-like figure who explains the meaning of “memento mori” to young Spike. Nothing lasts forever, we are told, something Boyle’s shot of the Sycamore is there to remind us.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jack O’Connell, Alfie Williams, Ralph Fiennes, Chi Lewis-Parry, Edvin Ryding, Christopher Fulford, Amy Cameron, Stella Gonet, Robert Rhodes, Celi Crossland, Emma Laird.
Dir Danny Boyle, Pro Danny Boyle, Alex Garland, Andrew Macdonald, Peter Rice and Bernie Bellew, Ex Pro Cillian Murphy, Screenplay Alex Garland, Ph Anthony Dod Mantle, Pro Des Carson McColl and Gareth Pugh, Ed Jon Harris, Music Young Fathers, Costumes Carson McColl and Gareth Pugh, Sound Johnnie Burn, Dialect coaches Jamie Matthewman, Victoria Hanlin, Sarah McGuinness and Helen Jane Simmons.
Columbia Pictures/DNA Films/Decibel Films-Columbia Pictures.
114 mins. UK/USA. 2025. UK and US Rel: 20 June 2025. Cert. 15.
