'28 Years Later' Review: A Tender, Thoughtful, and Strangely Moving Sequel to One of the Scariest Zombie Movies Ever

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If all zombie movies are implicitly about the dilemma of living with death, few have ever arrived at a more practical, elegant, or damningly familiar solution than Danny Boyle's '28 Days Later,' which reveals that the British mainland has been quarantined in order to contain the 'Rage' virus that has turned most of the island's population into fleet-footed monsters. How convenient it must have been for the rest of the world that hell on Earth could be so neatly compartmentalized.
That detail — undone by the end of Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's misbegotten '28 Weeks Later' in 2007, but retconned back into place with the opening text of the new sequel that Boyle has been itching to make ever since — is emblematic of a scuzzy post-9/11 masterpiece that continues to linger in the public imagination because of how nakedly it depicts the savagery that undergirds our civilization. Not just the anger that Western society foments against itself, but also the fragility of a species whose personal instinct for self-preservation has always been the greatest threat to its collective survival. Our loved ones live forever in our thoughts and prayers, while the faceless hordes being slaughtered in some other country might as well have never lived at all. As a certain mass-murderer is thought to have said: 'One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.'
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Zombie movies are scary because they render the intimate so impersonal that we have to admit there's no difference between them, and '28 Days Later' is perhaps the scariest of them all because its zombies — who succumb to infection almost as fast as they run — make it all but impossible to escape that fact. The genius of Boyle's strange but satisfying '28 Years Later' is that it sprints toward that same idea in search of salvation. Wildly unexpected for a film that's been promised for so long (even if its atheistic bent and penchant for huge narrative swings are the classic hallmarks of a collaboration between Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland), this tense and tender post-apocalyptic drama contends that to exist in denial of death is to corrupt the integrity of life itself.
More fraught than frightening, '28 Years Later' is full of all the jolts and gore you would expect from a big studio horror movie, but the world has changed a lot in the decades since the Rage virus spread across England — too much for this sequel to get away with replicate the same lo-fi dread of its source material, the terror of which was inextricable from the immediacy of its crisis. Rabid people still race at the screen as if they're going to chew a hole right through it, and the film's prologue, in which a room full of children are feasted upon as they watch 'Teletubbies,' is sick enough to stand alongside the queasiest moments from the original. And yet Boyle is smart and/or creatively restless enough to recognize that fast zombies don't have the same kick they did back in 2022, and the rest of the opening sequence is shot with the 'been there, chewed that' complacency of a movie that's eager to move onto other — calmer — things.
Namely: the isolationist community that forms on Holy Island in the aftermath of the outbreak. They've been there for almost 30 years by the time we lay eyes on the Northumberland haven (real-life population: 180), and — connected to the mainland by a causeway that's only crossable at low tide — have lived safely enough to establish their own social order and customs. The islanders don't have to care what's happening in the world beyond England's borders (the quarantine boats that circle the country, eager to exterminate anyone who tries to escape, are enough to make sure of that), and the luxury of solipsism almost seems worth the trade of living without power or resources.
As far as 12-year-old Spike is concerned, there are only two things that matter in this world: becoming a big, tough scavenger man like his father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and doing what he can to help his sick mother, Isla (Jodie Comer). We meet the lad on the day of his first excursion to the mainland, and Spike's coming-of-age ritual — chaperoned by his dad — is steeped in enough ceremony to confuse this sequel for any one of post-apocalyptic YA dramas released since '28 Days Later.' (It's also peppered with footage of old British war movies, as if to orient this story in a national history of colonial militarism.)
The rite of passage is more perilous than anticipated, as Spike and Jamie encounter several different varieties of infected (rotund 'Slow-Lows' and huge-dicked 'Alphas' now join the classic runners, whose clothes have all rotted away), but he's less impressed by the zombies than he is by the vastness of the world they inhabit. Fields! Forests! A curious, ever-burning fire that's kept aflame by a former doctor so demented that even Spike's dad is too scared to go near him! There's a lot to discover beyond the shores of Holy Island, including — Spike imagines — a cure for his mother's headaches, nosebleeds, and cognitive impairment. Frustrated that his dad seems to have given up on her, and conditioned to believe that protecting your own at any cost is the only valid expression of masculinity, Spike loads a few arrows in his quiver and sneaks back to the mainland with his mom in tow. His plan: find that crazy doctor and hope for the best.
If the last two acts of '28 Years Later' resemble the previous film more than its first act does (i.e., they focus on vulnerable people trying not to get chewed to bits as they move through the British countryside), whatever tonal continuity there is between 'Days' and 'Years' is mostly expressed through Anthony Dod Mantle's hyper-anamorphic iPhone cinematography, which subtly iterates on the Canon XL1 camera he used for the original in order to strike a fitting balance between the ugliness of social collapse and the beauty of restoring order. Colors pop with splendid promise, but the raw indifference of the natural world remains. Boyle calls further attention to the film's aesthetic by fetishizing the zombie kill shots with 'a poor-man's bullet-time,' which emphasizes the coolness of each arrow to the neck at the same time as the story begins to suggest that the infected might not be quite as mindless as they seem.
What the approach sacrifices in scares, it soon begins to make up for in that other, weirder kind of tension. Indeed, and with more earnest grace than any films have tried to humanize zombies before, '28 Years Later' is increasingly preoccupied with the idea that the difference between 'us' and 'them' is only a matter of perspective. Honestly, I cringed at the movie's first indications that it was going to explore how the infected have evolved (so boring, so far removed from the primitivism of the original), but Garland's script iterates on that concept in such radical and unexpected ways that I couldn't help but surrender to its potential.
The secret is that Spike's know-nothing naivete encourages us to see the world through the eyes of someone who's new to every part of it. Boyle has always had a knack for eliciting credible kid performances, and first-time actor Alfie Williams does a brilliant job of threading the needle between the fearlessness of a kid who steps into a zombie-infested nightmare, and the holy terror of a boy who can't live with the thought of losing his mom.
For her part, Comer is excellent in a role that eventually requires her to do more than just sweat a lot and look kind of lost, and while Isla's tendency to confuse Spike for her own late father plays a bit too much like movie dementia at first, the payoffs it inspires — including Spike's mixed feelings at being mistaken for a man, which is itself a conflation between the living and the dead — are rewarding enough to forgive this movie for many of the corners it cuts during the first 30 minutes. And maybe also for the fact that it clearly ends with another 100 minutes to go, as '28 Years Later' is very much just the first part of a story that will continue with Nia DaCosta's 'The Bone Temple' next year.
For someone who's been raised in the shadow of a zombie apocalypse, Spike has always lived in the absence of death. While a handful of crosses have been dug into a patch of grass on the village outskirts, death is something that happens on the far side of the causeway. Over there. Separated from the world Spike knows by a thin strip of land that's not even traversable for half of the day. There are ghosts on Holy Island, but no doctors; when people disappear on the mainland, the community is forbidden from rescuing them. But death, Spike comes to discover, has a life of its own, and his only hope of saving his mother will hinge on the dawning recognition that out of sight doesn't have to be the same thing as out of mind.
That recognition takes shape across the film's meditative and downbeat final chapter, which is just as dramatic a change of pace as the original film's third act pivot toward militarism and sexual slavery. Anchored by a beautiful — and funny — turn from Ralph Fiennes, whose take on Dr. Kelson is equal parts Colonel Kurtz and Albus Dumbledore ('The magic of the placenta!' is an instant classic line delivery), the surprisingly emotional last stretch of '28 Years Later' backgrounds Spike's attempts at avoiding death in order to foreground his need to reckon with it.
Memento mori: When the reality of death is forgotten, the value of life follows soon behind it. The world may have left England to rot (a subplot involving a foreign soldier implies that other nations have taken an active interest in helping that process along), but any society that allows an entire country to become an open-air graveyard is sick with a terrible virus of its own. While Boyle isn't lofty enough to suggest that the infected are beautiful creatures who deserve God's love or whatever (this is still a movie about wild-eyed naked zombies, after all, and its empathy for them only goes so far), '28 Years Later' effectively uses the tropes of its genre to insist that the line between a tragedy and a statistic is thinner than we think, and more permeable than we realize. The magic of the placenta, indeed.
Sony Pictures Releasing will release '28 Years Later' in theaters on Friday, June 20.
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