’28 Years Later’: Let’s Get Re-Infected

Time flies when you’re evading a rage virus. The terrifyingly tense, baroquely bizarre 28 Years Later adds revelatory piss and vinegar to the requisite fast-acting lab-leaked infection that drove the United Kingdom into a seething fury back when 28 Days Later came out in 2002 and 28 Weeks Later followed in 2007. 

Now, a generation later, this franchise’s rampaging return—brutal, strange, and thrilling—kicks off a planned trilogy that promises to be the most original revivification of humanity’s doom since George Miller reincarnated his Mad Max franchise with the furiously supercharged cinematic duo Fury Road and Furiosa.

28 YEARS LATER  ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Danny Boyle
Written by: Alex Garland
Starring: Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jack O’Connell, Alfie Williams, Ralph Fiennes
Running time: 115 mins

Unlike many sequels, 28 Years Later brings back the original brain trust: mischievously manic director Danny Boyle, prophetic futurist screenwriter Alex Garland, and digital-video maestro cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle. And, like the steroidal transformation among the film’s infected, this project has supercharged the trio’s creepy creativity. They’re clearly having a blast being back in their plague sandbox, exuding both a youthful energy and a world-weary wisdom that makes 28 Years Later such a horror show. 

They massacre a roomful of kids! Watching the Teletubbies! And that’s in the opening five minutes! As with the first film, 28 Years Later is a study of parents and children. How do you raise a family surrounded by such peril? How do you preserve a sense of morality? And now, three decades later, how do you normalize the abnormal for the next generation? 

Boyle famously disliked calling 28 Days Later a zombie movie. Technically, the infected are still alive: one plot point in the original film involved trying to figure out how long it would take for them to starve to death—if a shot to the head or the heart didn’t stop them first. And, in a very real sense, these movies are not technically post-apocalyptic, since the outside world has effective quarantined the infected. In 28 Years Later, continental Europe has kept the rage virus at bay and permanently sealed off the British Isles, an Unconditional Isolation Zone that the E.U. polices with patrol boats.  

Which doesn’t mean that all the Brits are brain-rotted lunatics. Pockets of civilization exist, including an island community in the Scottish Highlands that has spent the previous 28 years creating a new way of life based on local agriculture, fishing, and a heavily fortified perimeter focused on a causeway to the mainland that becomes submerged and unpassable during high tide. Far from the madding crowd, indeed. But looks closely, and you’ll find a touch of homegrown madness among them.

There’s a very British sensibility to 28 Years Later that leans into the stiff-upper-lipped provincialism of Shakespeare’s Scepter’d Isle. “Fail We May, But Go We Must,” declares a civic banner. Rudyard Kipling’s war poem “Boots,” so wonderfully deployed in the film’s trailer, here becomes an anthemic background chant to an early montage of archival footage showing industrious Brits at work. Archery is paramount—cue shots of the bowmen from Laurence Olivier’s Henry V film adaptation—and pagan rituals aren’t far behind. What’s the deal with those bone-colored, artfully bloody masks that the movie shows briefly but never explains? Consider 28 Years Later the latest entry in cinema’s rich and odd subgenre of folk horror.  

The story focuses on Spike (Alfie Williams), a thoughtful 12-year-old boy whose tender mother Isla (Jodie Comer) is bed-ridden with an unknown ailment, while his macho father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is hell-bent on teaching his son how to be a man. And part of the ritual of becoming an adult is crossing the causeway into the mainland and testing your skills shooting arrows into the infected. 

28 years later, those creatures seem to divide into two categories: “the fat ones and the fast ones.” The plump beasts, gray and slimy, crawl slowly on the ground like bloated ticks and mostly eat worms. They call quick monsters Alphas, due to their taller stature, alarming speed, and ability to be almost calculating in their otherwise anger-saturated behavior. 

On Spike’s harrowing virgin outing—one of many effectively nail-biting sequences in this nerve-shredding movie—he notices a bonfire in the distance. His father tells him it’s probably a man named Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), a loner who people think has lost his mind and no one has seen or talked to for fifteen years. But all Spike hears is “doctor.” And, once they’re back at their village and it’s clear that Jamie doesn’t care about Isla’s health, Spike makes it his mission to sneak off-island with his mom and track down Kelson.

 So begins a journey into the heart of darkness that involves life, death, birth, impressively well-hung berserkers, bumping into a sour Swedish solider, getting shot with morphine darts, and being told that the best way to repel the infected is to be completely covered in iodine. There’s a forest of tree-sized towers made out of human femurs, and an immense cone of skulls that becomes the site of a well-earned emotional catharsis which is also genuinely, objectively grotesque. 

“Remember you must die,” says the good doctor. But also know that 28 Years Later has no intention of ending anytime soon. Like most world-building installments, this film suffers from willfully obscure plot points and intentionally unexplained iconography that it clearly plants for pay-offs in successive sequels. After the climax comes a coda which is clearly more of a prelude. But it does involve a gang of survivors with bleached mullets and velour track suits who use a mix of parkour and circus tumbling to make mincemeat out of their enemies. There’s still more life in this memento mori. To quote the film’s closing minutes: “Fucking go.”