Review: 28 Years Later

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland return to the franchise that defined fast zombies for the 21st century with a sequel that is at once unexpected, scatterbrained, and occasionally sublime. It doesn’t so much sprint back into the world of 28 Days Later as it stumbles, eyes wide with wonder, into something far stranger and, in its best moments, far more human. This is a sequel that proves it's reason to exist quickly, morphing into a film that both stresses you out and breaks your heart.

The premise is simple enough: decades after the Rage virus ravaged Britain, the mainland remains a rotting, unlit carcass surrounded by an international quarantine cordon. On Holy Island, a tiny causeway-bound speck off the Northumberland coast, a hardy few survivors have retreated into isolation, surviving without electricity or medicine, their community governed by fear, myth, and a thinly veiled medievalism. When 12-year-old Spike (newcomer Alfie Williams) sets out on a rite-of-passage scavenging trip to the mainland with his father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), he inadvertently sets in motion a quiet moral unraveling that ultimately challenges the most deeply held beliefs of his insular world.

Boyle’s return to the director’s chair is at once confident and experimental. Gone is the raw, digital immediacy of Days, replaced here by Anthony Dod Mantle’s hyper-anamorphic iPhone photography, a slick and distorted visual palette that oscillates between pastoral beauty and post-apocalyptic ruin. It’s the kind of filmmaking that reminds you why Boyle is one of the few directors alive who can turn a severed artery into visual poetry. The early scenes, particularly the hauntingly absurd prologue of infected devouring children watching Teletubbies, pulse with a macabre energy that recalls the best moments of Days and even the nihilism of Trainspotting.

But Garland’s script isn’t interested in rehashing old ground. Where 28 Days Later explored the collapse of society, and Weeks lost itself in spectacle, Years veers toward myth and metaphor. The zombies, now grotesquely evolved into “Slow-Lows” and terrifying “Alphas”, are less a threat than a symbol, representing a death long denied by the people who fled it. And in young Spike, Garland finds a perfect cipher for that denial. Naïve, idealistic, and aching to prove himself a man, Spike drags his ailing mother (Jodie Comer) back to the mainland, in search of a doctor who may or may not exist.

What he finds instead is Dr. Kelton, played by Ralph Fiennes in a performance so weirdly magnetic it all but derails the film in the best possible way. Equal parts shaman, philosopher, and lunatic, Kelton is holed up in a bone cathedral of his own design, painting himself with iodine and preaching the gospel of Memento Mori. Fiennes gives him a kind of messianic gentleness, a horror movie Kurtz who’s decided that remembering the dead is more sacred than surviving them. “The magic of the placenta,” he intones, and somehow it’s both hilarious and profound.

This shift from zombie thriller to psychological parable doesn’t always cohere. And yet, there’s a genuine ache to Spike's journey, as he gradually learns that protecting life means more than denying death. The infected are still monstrous, still dangerous, but their menace now feels like a mirror held up to the living a reminder that isolation can be as dehumanizing as infection.

28 Years Later is not the lean, brutal film that 28 Days Later was. It’s baggier, more erratic, and more prone to philosophical tangents. But it’s also richer in some ways, more daring in its willingness to ask whether the infected are the true monsters or whether they’ve simply adapted to a world that no longer wants to remember its own dead. As the first chapter of a new trilogy, it kicks things off with a strong start.

4/5