28 YEARS LATER

There's something deeply frightening about zombies. It's their finality, the inevitability, the certainty that there is no cure and no way to fully contain the spread. Unlike vampires or werewolves or ghosts, zombies will always, inevitably, become the dominant species, and the survivors are assuredly left to survive in any way they can. There's no coming back from zombies, no proper rebuilding, no full recovery, on an individual or a societal level.

Perhaps it's also the sense, though, that when we look at them, we see something of ourselves in them. They once were us, but now something primal and uncontrollable has been activated in them. Where a vampire has rational thought and agency, a zombie has none. They are violence unleashed, and unleashed within bodies that once did possess rational thought. Maybe what makes them so frightening and so fascinating within the horror genre is that, more than most of the monsters that populate these stories, they act as a mirror back to us.

Finally returning to their scrappy 2002 zombie classic '28 Days Later' after over 20 years, director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland haven't forgotten this core principle, one that made their original film so powerful and so memorable. In an act of course correction after the misguided and unrelenting grimness of '28 Weeks Later' (2007), they have once again reduced the scope down to an intimate human drama, returned to the key aesthetic principles that made the original feel so immediate and further considered how this series can continue to speak to very human and uncomfortably relevant concerns. It may have been a long wait for '28 Years Later', but the wait has absolutely been worth it.

Unfortunately, it's hard to talk about '28 Years Later' without discussing some of its many surprises. I'll try to keep spoilers to a minimum, but be vigilant.

With the Rage Virus fully contained to the islands of the United Kingdom, they have been quarantined off from the rest of the world for decades, with no one allowed in or out. Any survivors have been forced to fend for themselves. For 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams, TV's 'His Dark Materials'), this is the only world he has known, living on an island off the mainland in a small survivor community with his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, 2025's 'Nosferatu') and mother Isla (Jodie Comer, 'The Last Duel'). Isla has been suffering from a degenerative illness, but with no doctors on the island, no one has been able to help her. In desperation, Spike smuggles her to the mainland in order to find Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes, 'Conclave'), a renegade surviving amongst the Infected, who everyone believes has lost his mind. Convinced this is his last chance to save his mother, Spike must lead Isla through the dangers of the mainland, now populated by an ever-growing population of Infected who have evolved to survive, even to the extent of forming the beginnings of their own social structures.

SWITCH: '28 YEARS LATER' TRAILER E

Boyle and Garland were never going to make a straightforward zombie movie with '28 Years Later'. Boyle's style is too eclectic and exciting for that, and through his directing work, Garland's fascination with how genre filmmaking can unpack the darker aspects of human nature has only grown sharper. As a result, '28 Years Later' is a far stranger film than one would expect, and is all the better for it. We're not witnessing the collapse of society (as we did with '28 Days Later') or its attempt at reconstruction (as with '28 Weeks Later'), but the aftermath of the apocalypse, where the remnants of "civilised" society have created something suggestive of what once was. In the final act of the original film, we saw a falling back on dangerous gender roles and an adoption of patriarchal power structures, not through malice but through instinct. Now, 28 years on, the island survivors have adopted an almost medieval approach, a sense of honour, chivalry and ritual. Jamie leads Spike on an expedition to the mainland as a form of initiation, a transition to manhood through his first kill. Rules are in place for survival, but after nearly three decades, these have attained a kind of religious fervour. There's no sense that the world will one day go back to normal. This is the world, and the only normal is to survive it.

This brings an undercurrent of hysteria to '28 Years Later'. While the survivors on the island seem to live a difficult yet comfortable life, built on camaraderie and community, there's something stirring underneath, a manic energy to compensate for the fact that, in surviving, they have also given up. The future for these people is repetition, the same then as it is now. Their resources are limited, their homes are crumbling, and there's no one coming from the outside world to save them. Perhaps this is why they resort to tradition, ritual and pageantry, folderol to drown out the certainty that they have no future. Either they'll fade away or the fortress they have built against the Infected will fail. This makes Spike's mission to save his mother all the more potent. Where the rest of his community has accepted their hopelessness, he still has one flicker of hope, that life can move forward. And he's willing to wander into the jaws of the beast to do it.

This is where '28 Years Later' really becomes something special, in how it approaches the evolution of the Infected. The human drama is still the central focus, but Boyle and Garland have also considered how this species may have changed over the nearly three decades. If '28 Days Later' was indebted to John Wyndham's classic sci-fi novel 'The Day of the Triffids', '28 Years Later' feels similarly indebted to Richard Matheson's equally brilliant vampire novel 'I Am Legend', in that it considers what happens when the monsters become the dominant species. What we learn of the Infected only comes through Spike's eyes, and while Jamie provides some exposition, Boyle mostly relies on visual storytelling and observation to show us the lives of the Infected. There are the early stirrings of social hierarchies, suggestions of interpersonal relationships, even evidence of evolving into different subspecies. The world of the mainland is far stranger than simply mindless killer organisms roaming around looking for meat. While the film wisely never goes as far as humanising the Infected, it does show them as more than fodder for horror movie gore. In fact, the radical step it seems to be taking is fully embracing them as a species of their own.

At its best, '28 Years Later' offers a series of conundrums and questions, all built on those already laid down by the original film. The immediacy of the outbreak meant that, for Jim, dehumanising the Infected was almost a step too far. He still saw them as people, even if they were stripped of their humanity. In Spike, we see a similar conundrum. While killing the Infected is a necessity for survival, he bristles against the idea of killing them for sport. In his bombastic way, Boyle balances making the kills thrilling in one frame and horrifying in the next. There's an undercurrent of cruelty to the treatment of the Infected (an undercurrent that, in its final minutes, blossoms and takes centre stage), and so the film, by extension, begins to question the "humanity" of the survivors. If the Infected are the dominant, and if they are developing into a society of their own, is abject cruelty towards them justified? In order to survive, how much of our compassion are we willing to relinquish?

What sits as a chief concern for '28 Years Later', and results in both its most upsetting and most moving moments, is what death means in a world where it has become the norm. How do we face it? How do we live with it? How do we honour it? How do we accept it? How do we wield it? What Boyle and Garland seem to be saying is that it isn't just how we choose to live that makes us human, but also how we choose to sit with death. In the film's most powerful sequence, the reality of death becomes something generous and beautiful, a startling gesture after two hours of violence and gore, but the fact that Boyle and Garland choose to place so much importance on this sentiment says volumes about what they believe these films to be about. In a world where death is a constant, we still need to grieve and remember.

The thematic complexity of '28 Years Later' makes it such an exciting film, but Boyle balances that with his usual veracity, daring and weirdness. He once again reunites with Oscar-winning cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, who, along with Boyle, Garland and producer Andrew Macdonald, formed the core creative force behind the original film. The aesthetic principles set in place for the original are honoured here, an iPhone replacing the DV camera. It's not that far removed from the principles of Dogma 95 that Mantle helped define, accepting whatever idiosyncrasies the iPhone camera gives them. Shots are out of focus or poorly framed, light quality changes drastically between shots and there's a digital ugliness at times, but just as with '28 Days Later', there's an immense beauty to how that is handled here. This quality makes the film feel immediate, almost voyeuristic, a frantic hysteria that matches the intense paranoia and fear that pulsates through it. There are moments where Boyle leans fully into unreality (including one sequence that could have fallen out of a George Miller film), but he commits to these moments of strangeness without any concessions and, as a consequence, they work surprisingly well. It also makes sense for a world that has slipped back into a medieval cosmology. Britain is once again a land of gods and monsters, knights and beasts, and so the visual language of the film follows suit. Complementing this visual flair is the frenetic editing from Jon Harris, an endless stream of shock cuts and sudden jolts that add to the purposeful unreality of the film. Boyle wants this experience to be a sensory assault, and to the film's enormous advantage, he really goes for broke. It's been over five years since we had a feature film from this Oscar-winning filmmaker, and it's clear just how much passion and enthusiasm he has for returning to both the big screen and one of his greatest works.

While all the recognisable key players are terrific (especially Comer and Fiennes), the film really belongs to Alfie Williams. The film rests so heavily on his shoulders, but he's a powerhouse every moment he's on screen. He imbues Spike with such weariness, such pain, such hope, such bravery and such fear, and he lights up the screen in every shot he appears (which is most of the film). This is a star-making turn for Williams, not dissimilar to what it was like seeing a young Tom Holland before the MCU chewed him up. I'd dare say that the film simply wouldn't work without him.

In the lead-up to its release, I felt myself getting progressively more hopeful about '28 Years Later'. The spectacular first trailer certainly helped, but it was also the sense that, unlike so many properties being revived now, this one did feel like it had something more to say, and that reuniting Danny Boyle and Alex Garland might be the best shot it had. The film itself didn't so much surpass my expectations as subvert them, delivering an experience I wasn't expecting but a far more nuanced, interesting and bizarre one than I could have hoped. This is a truly stellar film, intelligently written and bombastically realised, building on the grand tradition of weird and wonderful British science fiction and perhaps the most inherently cinematic sub-genre of horror storytelling. It also left me hungry for more, with the next film, '28 Years Later: The Bone Temple', already on the horizon.

Best of all, it embraces that which makes zombies so enthralling and so terrifying, that by holding a mirror up to us, they force us to question who is more the monster - the brainless, primal organism whose only instinct is to kill, or the sentient being who chooses to?