28 Years Later comes at an interesting time for director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland, two artists who, while still turning out popular work, have by no means been operating at the height of their powers. Garland’s star, in particular, has faded quite a bit. Ex Machina is still his best work by a very long way. Annihilation had some impact at the time, but in retrospect it feels a bit silly and, for all the FX, colourless and unimaginative, particularly in comparison to the source material. 2022’s Men was just a disaster.
It makes sense, therefore, that Boyle and Garland would choose to return to a genre they helped define in 2002’s 28 Days Later, one of the most important and influential horror films of the decade. It did more than any other movie to launch the 2000s zombie craze, a mostly lamentable movement which petered out, fittingly, in a series of limp horror comedies.
28 Days stands out above that shambling pack like a lodestar. It stood in a clear lineage with Romero’s classics, whilst still taking the genre in a novel direction, attributing the zombie apocalypse to physiological causes, the frightening “Rage virus” that turns people into slavering spree-killers. This was in contrast to the ambiguous spiritual-supernatural atmosphere of Romero’s series, which depicts science as totally baffled and prostrate before the hordes of undead, and never provides an explanation beyond “When there is no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth.”
28 Days married beauty and dread in a way which very few films of any genre accomplish. The opening shots of Cillian Murphy’s character walking alone through a completely abandoned London are unforgettable, transcending the puerile survivalist fantasies of most post-apocalyptic narratives, to evoke a real sense of the sublime. It’s hard to think of a tougher act to follow – and so here we are!
As you would guess from the title, 28 Years Later takes place long after the apocalypse. It follows a child named Spike (Alfie Williams), who lives in a small community off the coast of Scotland with his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his mother Isla (Jodie Comer), who is ailing physically and mentally from an unknown illness. Jamie is a hunter who regularly goes ashore to look for supplies. He is an expert archer, the community having rediscovered the ancient British art of the longbow. The film opens as he is preparing to take Spike along with him on his first expedition.
It sounds like a fairly typical premise for a zombie movie, but 28 Years Later is a much weirder film than you might think from watching the trailers or reading a plot summary. The opening scenes are intercut with brief nightmare sequences that reflect the terror the characters feel beneath their affected stoicism, as well as clips from old movies of English bowmen on a medieval battlefield. Despite all the characters being Scottish, a tattered St George’s flag flies above their village; I’m not sure if this was a comment on Scottish national identity, but the film’s main message seems to be that England is a complete disaster and always has been.
Beyond these stylistic flourishes, however, the film is, tonally, completely chaotic. Ordinarily this would be a very serious criticism, but it is clearly a deliberate move on Boyle’s part. Where 28 Days combined beauty and dread, 28 Years introduces a new note, that of the absurd. For instance, there’s a scene early on where Spike and Jamie, coming to the edge of the forest, pause to watch a herd of very fake-looking CGI deer stampede past. “They’re beautiful,” says Spike, in a clear parody of the memorable scene from 28 Days where the protagonists are overcome with emotion upon seeing a family of wild horses running free.
The first third or so of the movie offers most of the classic zombie thrills, with Spike and Jamie engaging hordes of infected with their longbows before taking shelter for the night in a ruined church. Ultimately, however, the film doesn’t really create much of a sense of danger for the main characters. The focus is much more on the family’s troubled relationships with each other. The father, Jamie, is particularly well-drawn, as a man who combines an unflappable sense of duty with private weakness. He is having an affair with the village schoolmistress, and when Spike witnesses them in the act he takes his mother’s side, leading her across to the mainland to find a cure to her condition from the eccentric, death-obsessed Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes).
28 Years Later often feels very disjointed; for instance, the introduction of a comic-relief character, a stranded NATO sailor (Edvin Ryding), doesn’t serve any real purpose in the plot—although the character, while he’s around, is fairly entertaining. By the time the film reaches its climax with Dr. Kelson, the wild tonal shifts have destroyed the possibility of any genuine emotional engagement with the characters, and the film deteriorates into complete bathos.
Again, this sounds like a serious criticism; but somehow it all works. I found this approach much more satisfying than what might have been an earnest attempt by Boyle to recapture the impact of the original. He deliberately undermines the notion – a very popular one nowadays – that the destruction of society and the everyday order might somehow lead to greater personal fulfilment or a richer premodern life. The film’s message seems rather to be that the absurdity and malaise that plague us now will only become more and more magnified as things get worse.
I felt a bit ambivalent watching 28 Years Later, but I was swayed by its last scene, which combines Monty Python-esque farce with the sudden introduction of a new character modelled on one of the great monsters of British history. It was such a completely nihilistic note to end things on that it was hard not to take it as a rebuke to the po-faced solemnity of survival media like The Last Of Us, and a comment on the exhaustion of the genre that Boyle helped to define. That exhaustion notwithstanding, I’m pretty keen to see the next instalment (not 28 Decades Later, unfortunately, but 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple).
28 Years Later is currently playing in cinemas.