At The Movies: Food for thought in 28 Years Later, My Sunshine a heartfelt coming-of-age drama
28 Years Later (M18)
115 minutes, showing in cinemas ★★★★☆
The story: British director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland revisit the Rage Virus of 28 Days Later (2002) they created more than two decades earlier. Great Britain is now quarantined from the continent: who needs Brexit? A community, which survived the cannibalistic undead, has settled on a feudal fortress island connected to the mainland by a tidal causeway.
Spike (Alfie Williams) is the boy hero of 28 Years Later, the third entry following 28 Weeks Later (2007) in the auteur zombie series. On his 12th birthday, his dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) takes him on a manly rite-of-passage hunt on the mainland.
It is his introduction to the ghastly Infected roving the wilderness. The blubbery belly-crawling humanoids are easy targets for his arrows. Not the Alphas: they have evolved to be faster, smarter, feral and near-unkillable.
Spike, however, has heard rumours of a physician, and he is soon sneaking back outside the safe zone, determined to save his long-ailing mother (Jodie Comer). That the mythical doctor is a kook played by Ralph Fiennes would be an encounter worth any danger, even, possibly, the Alphas chasing him down to rip his head off with spinal column attached.
The movie in all its punk-rock helter-skelter viscera was filmed using iPhones and amplified by military footage. What is the Rage Virus if not Boyle's parable of humanity eating itself alive with its anger?
And violence here becomes an entryway into a moving rumination on mortality for Spike, an innocent who has never known disease or death.
Wherever Hollywood director Nia DaCosta (The Marvels, 2023) leads him next in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, the second in a new trilogy due in 2026, Boyle has reaffirmed himself as a vital innovator of a seminal horror lore.
Hot take: There is food for thought, not just flesh-chomping frights.
My Sunshine (M18)
90 minutes, opens exclusively at The Projector on June 26 ★★★☆☆
(From left) Kiara Nakanishi and Keitatsu Koshiyama in My Sunshine.
PHOTO: THE PROJECTOR
The story: During one winter in a Japanese island town, two adolescents pair up for an upcoming skating competition. Taipei Film Festival's 2024 Special Jury Prize winner will not be the usual underdog sports drama.
My Sunshine is an understated movie constructed of glances. Takuya (Keitatsu Koshiyama), a shy schoolboy with a stutter, is with his ice hockey team at the local recreation centre when he sights figure skater Sakura (Kiara Nakanishi) elegantly gliding on the rink. He is spellbound.
The older girl has eyes only for her coach Arakawa (Sosuke Ikematsu), who later sees Takuya clumsily attempting Sakura's manoeuvres and is moved to mentor him. A former skating champion, he also sees something of himself in Takuya's passion.
The lad is so endearing that haughty Sakura, a rising star from big-city Tokyo, needs little persuasion from Arakawa to begin training with him for a mixed duo contest.
They become a family. An excursion to a frozen lake is a joyous high as the threesome cavort madly and embrace tightly against the magic hour light.
But then comes another, unhappier glance: Sakura espies Arakawa with his male partner. The idyll is over even before the season's snow has melted.
Japanese writer-director Hiroshi Okuyama's sophomore feature had seemed just a sweet, nostalgic coming-of-age confection, one that is suddenly very grown-up and deeply sad in confronting Japanese society's conservative gender norms and homophobia.
The sensitive performances play the emotions for real because they are: Okuyama based the screenplay on his experiences as a junior skater.
Hot take: This youthful romance, slender though it is, holds heartfelt feelings, tender and sorrowful.
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