Danny Boyle’s horror movie 28 Days Later managed, somehow, to kickstart both an explosion in zombie cinema and a debate over whether it is, in fact, a zombie movie. It isn’t just the elimination of George Romero’s trademark zombie shuffle in favor of sprinting, marauding mobs; it’s the very origins of the poor wretches, who are not technically undead, but rather afflicted with a lab-grown “rage virus,” which takes hold with terrifying, unstoppable speed and turns the victim into a raving, red-eyed monster. Bites can spread it, as with classic zombies, but so can blood splattered into the mouth or eyes – and there’s plenty of splatter to go around, given that one of the chief rapid-onset symptoms is a prodigious vomiting of blood.
I bring this up not to start more nerd debates – all movie monsters have their variations, and these seem well within those bounds – but to explain that Boyle’s new film 28 Years Later, a long-gap follow-up to the first film (and, to a lesser extent but still canonized, its 2007 sequel), offers no further clarity for the nitpickers or the genre diehards. It is both far more of a zombie movie, and further afield of what some fans will expect from the genre. On one hand, the passage of time, during which the virus has been re-contained within Britain through a merciless quarantine system, has made the roaming creatures more appreciably zombielike, stripped of their humanity to various degrees. Some sprint ever-forward in the bloodied nude; others have experienced long-term viral complications that have them bloated and crawling along the ground, slurping up worms from the soil. At least one has become a pack-leading “alpha.” Certain physiological questions about zombie evolution are answered – only to raise further unanswered ones.
Yet those who were led to a variety of zombie-slaying, post-apocalyptic hellscapes by the original 28 Days Later may be taken aback by how much of Boyle’s film, reuniting him with the original’s screenwriter Alex Garland, takes a more coming-of-age shape. After a harrowing opening flashback that provides another glimpse into the initial virus outbreak, the movie jumps forward, again using its title as an on-screen time marker. Around 2030, a pocket of seemingly thriving society has formed on an island off the English coast, accessible by a single narrow causeway at low tide and fortified with far-seeing guard posts. 13-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) is about to undergo the island’s coming-of-age ritual: Accompanied by his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), he will travel to the mainland for the first time and put his long-practiced zombie-killing skills to use.
Spike seems less worried about the rage-virus hordes than his otherwise-afflicted mother Isla (Jodie Comer), bedridden and prone to memory loss and disorientation. He becomes increasingly determined to help her, as a rift grows between his loving yet sometimes intractable father. To offer more in the way of plot details might spoil the movie’s strange, beguiling combination of tripwire-tight suspense and episodic wandering. Suffice to say that some of the most obvious candidates for set pieces do not come to pass, and that the film occasionally resembles an eerie fairy tale. Sometimes this is just a fleeting moment, like a shot of Spike and others sitting in a field of yellow flowers. Other storybook (or maybe comic book) images recur: When an alpha-predator zombie lurks on the mainland, Boyle shoots him repeatedly from a shadowy distance, a darkened figure on the horizon.
As with the first film, the look of 28 Years Later is key to its effectiveness. Still working with the brilliant digital-era cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle but no longer employing the early DV cameras that captured the first film with such smeary distinction (is that equipment even available anymore?), Boyle does his best to rough up the more polished digital tools of 23 years later, which mostly means not disguising them as celluloid. (Boyle belongs with Steven Soderbergh and Michael Mann on a list of early digital adopters who are most adept at leaning into the format and exposing its secret strengths that go beyond its economic and logistical efficiencies.) After six years away, Boyle goes into show-off mode: Freeze-frames stutter through some of the grislier action; a dusky sky turns impossibly dreamlike as figures sprint across the causeway, appearing to walk on water; early on, he cuts in footage of medieval pictures and old newsreels to evoke the feeling of Britain in wartime throughout the ages.
Anyone expecting COVID-19 parallels may come away disappointed. There are intimations of a kind of vaster, involuntary version of Brexit, where Britain has been cut off from the rest of its former European brethren – at one point, Spike encounters an irate, marooned Swede who has been living modern life more or less as we know it, and realizes the kid has no idea what a cell phone is (or, for that matter, the internet, so it’s not all bad). But Garland doesn’t seem much interested in evoking more recent global disasters, as if that would violate some early-2000s mythology. The obvious questions about how or whether the infected qualify as their own evolving species – the parallels with our humanity and inhumanity that Romero was so fond of drawing – are glanced over, especially in one graphic scene in the final stretch, only for the movie to swerve away. Garland and Boyle are more invested in the confrontation of death and its place in our world, whether it comes related to a fate-worse-than or just the bad luck of living. Ralph Fiennes has a scene-stealing role to drive this home, and young Alfie Williams makes a surprisingly sturdy scene partner to the likes of Fiennes, Comer, and Taylor-Johnson. As gory as the movie gets, there’s an overlay of grim young-adult adventure, part of the film’s woodsy counterpart to the more urban setting of the original.
Even without any pointed pandemic-era observations, 28 Years Later a lot of movie, narratively and visually. This makes its wild final moments, explicitly teasing an already-shot sequel from Garland and director Nia DaCosta, not sit as well as the rest. Spike’s story comes to a satisfying conclusion that the movie then insta-epilogues with the promise of a whole other saga. Then again, maybe that perseverance is what makes these zombie pictures; Romero’s dead kept marching and mutating onward, too.
Director: Danny Boyle Writer: Alex Garland Starring: Alfie Williams, Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ralph Fiennes Release Date: June 20, 2025
