In the 22 years since 28 Days Later weaponized enraged crowds with its viral horror, the zombie fiction that grew from Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s relatively restrained digital nightmare often took its various apocalyptic premises to their logical conclusions, spreading out as completely as a world-ending infection. These stories weren’t just about surviving the present-day problems of the undead, but learning to exist in a new society defined by their existence. But after 28 Weeks Later, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 2007 sequel, kept its allegorical thrills quarantined to a militarized unsafe zone, the Rage Virus has finally broken containment with the original creative team’s return to the series. With decades of history to integrate into its fiction, 28 Years Later necessarily expands in scope as a coming-of-age saga seen through the eyes of a generation born into a ruined world. A blistering adventure filled with dread and wonder, there’s a macabre classicism to the film—a sense that, even if life as we know it falls apart, some essential elements persevere.
Some of these are inherently regressive and conservative, like those persisting in a small tidal island village connected by a causeway to the mainland. There, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is about to lead his son Spike (Alfie Williams) on a traditional rite of passage: They must cross over and blood the youngster by having him put down some of the wandering infected. They wield bows and arrows, fletched by the same old-timer who looks after Spike’s ailing mother Isla (Jodie Comer). It’s a dangerous mission, but it’s not like they’re undertaking it in order to hunt game or forage for supplies. This is pure sport, a ritual to make sure their community members will kill when required.
Boyle and his longtime cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (who shot much of the film’s distorted, bulging, sometimes abstractly beautiful images on a variety of iPhone set-ups), infuse the early escapades of 28 Years Later with flashes of multimedia, not only to amp up the energy but to visually establish what lives on in their characters’ cultural consciousness. Integrating art deeply linked with a nostalgic British conception of wartime—Young Fathers’ heart attack of a soundtrack integrates Taylor Holmes’ percussive reading of Rudyard Kipling’s “Boots;” archers from Laurence Olivier’s Henry V fire their volleys into the air—into the film, Boyle jolts Jamie and Spike’s trip off-island with a violent machismo. When a bolt brains an infected, the camera pivots for a better view of the moment of impact, adjusting the frame like a Mortal Kombat fatality.
This is a symptom of coming from a community that has all but regressed to the Late Middle Ages; it’s no coincidence the Saint George’s Cross flies over the town (a symbol which can also tie into the isolated tale’s Brexit connections). Cut off from civilization, scraping by is the best anyone can do. Garland personifies this idea in Spike’s parents: The bloviating, bloodthirsty Jamie and the suffering, shunned Isla reflect dueling endpoints for Spike’s future. To Jamie, life is only ensured if you can take it in kind. And yet, that reality is only available to some. Without any medical professionals in town, Isla’s sickness—feverish, migraine-inflicted, and with episodes of memory loss—may as well be an imbalance of humors.
28 Years Later then becomes the sprawling tale of Spike relating to the outside world through each of his parents. Split into two distinct parts—one with his father, seeking death, and one with his mother, seeking life—the film moves tonally from jittery thriller to pastoral elegy, all the while deepening its mythology. Some of these latter points, like the infected populace’s apparent ability to reproduce, resonate thematically with Spike’s story. All of them seem intended to create distracting complications for those trying to see any realistic rhyme or reason in how the franchise’s virus works. The introduction of obese, worm-eating infected crawling slowly around the country and of badass “alphas” who can take more arrows than Boromir make the film’s world feel cheesily beholden to zombie games like Left 4 Dead or The Last Of Us.
But some of these imaginative expansions have far more to offer. A shipwrecked soldier adding another pathetic military man to this franchise’s roster, Erik (Edvin Ryding), and the demented doctor Spike seeks out, Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), both provide invigorating perspective shifts for the young protagonist as well as levity-filled, scene-chewing material for their performers. Free from the town’s new normal—either because they come from overseas where their biggest problem is having a dead-end job as a delivery driver, or because they’ve self-isolated as a kind of one-man death cult—they shake the cage of Spike’s young mind. His encounters with each are more fleshed-out than those with either parent, due in part to a lopsided script that backloads itself in service of future sequels, including one subtitled with the film’s most striking image, The Bone Temple.
Even this imbalance, though, doesn’t take away from the evocative world-building done by the film. The biggest success of 28 Years Later is that, by the film’s end, mere survival is less of a priority for both audience and hero, usurped instead by a desire to explore. By taking the film away from the familiar—both in regards to the franchise itself and its genre spawn—the story’s fresh eyes tempt audiences with lush landscapes and strange characters. Fiennes, shredded and covered in blood at the base of a skull tower, making Shakespeare jokes is just as good as Ryding trying to describe an iPhone to a kid who might as well live on a different planet. That’s a boon for a film intended to feel like a first step into the wilderness, one that confronts its young hero with the reality of death—both banal and spine-rippingly bonkers—and the possibilities of life.
Director: Danny Boyle
Writer: Alex Garland
Starring: Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jack O’Connell, Alfie Williams, Ralph Fiennes
Release Date: June 20, 2025
