28 Years Later
“There’s no discharge in the war,” says the narrator of Rudyard Kipling’s 1915 poem “Boots,” about the drudgery and the terror of a life spent in the trenches. There’s also no place to charge your iPhone. Stranded in a field in England a foreign soldier looks angrily at his cellphone, which is down to 1 percent battery. “It’ll be a brick in a minute,” he scoffs to his companions before tossing the thing into the tall grass. Given the postapocalyptic particulars of their situation, it’s not like he can call for backup anyway.
Danny Boyle’s long-awaited 28 Years Later contains multitudes: It’s literary enough to invoke Kipling (and Taylor Holmes’s chilling, rhythmic spoken-word rendition) in a way that matters and knowing enough to use the aforementioned bit of Apple product placement as a self-reflexive sight gag. Way back in 2002, Boyle and his cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle shot the original 28 Days Later on consumer-grade camcorders, meeting the post–Blair Witch Project demand for found-footage realism. Reuniting two decades later for the sequel, Boyle and Mantle have opted to use the iPhone 15 Max—or actually a whole fleet of them, strapped to a laser-printed 3D rig—a choice that drags their aesthetic in the opposite direction, away from low cost ugliness toward an anodyne and scarifying clarity.
Boyle has always been a showman who likes to induce hallucinations in his viewers. Such shape-shifting can be maddening but it also means that there’s still a certain element of surprise decades into his career. So, it’s heartening to report that 28 Years Later is his best movie in a long time. The excitement begins with its frenetic but sophisticated visual style, which hinges on a stunning sense of nature's scale. The overwhelming feeling is that of being somehow stranded and encircled all at once by the outdoors. The hugeness of certain images is arresting, as the extra-wide aspect ratio pushes certain sequences—a glimpse of distant fire along an endless tree line, a group of naked infected cresting a hill in silhouette, a drone’s-eye view of a father and son being pursued at dusk along a waterlogged causeway—into the realm of authentically cosmic horror.
It’s not just Boyle and Mantle who are in good form here. Alex Garland’s script is probably the best of his career, filtering his usual concerns—the fragility of social codes, the ambiguity of human nature, how cool it is to watch groups of heavily armed soldiers securing perimeters—through a multifaceted series of emotional prisms. All zombie movies are to some extent about mortality but 28 Years Later is death tinged in ways that bypass convention. The most devastating moment in 28 Days Later was Brendan Gleeson’s last desperate look at his daughter before succumbing to the rage virus, and, without failing his obligation to deliver the gory genre goods, which there are plenty of, Garland exposes and touches a similar set of nerves. The tension between the film’s outsized scale and its intimate story is real and bracing; it’s an epic that grows increasingly overwhelming as it shrinks its field of view.
Beginning with his 1996 debut novel, The Beach (the film adaptation of which also initiated his long-running collaboration with Boyle), Garland has displayed a fascination with stories of isolated enclaves teetering on the edge of some larger, darker reality. And so, it is in 28 Years Later, which is set primarily in Lindisfarne, a.k.a. Holy Island, a rocky outcropping in the North Sea connected to the mainland via a land bridge whose accessibility comes and goes with the tides.
Beyond the naturally occurring barrier of the causeway, the island is heavily fortified against potential invasion. There are also systems in place to ensure that the population stays in fighting shape. The primary rite of passage is for boys to go on supervised hunting expeditions to the mainland, honing their bow and arrow skills (and cultivating a greater appreciation for the tough but secure life they’re living behind iron gates). “The more you kill, the easier it gets,” says roughneck Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) to his son, Spike (Alfie Williams), who’s reluctant to make the journey, less out of fear for his own safety than over leaving his mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), as she wastes away in the throes of some mysterious illness. Alfie suspects that his dad is sick of carrying such a heavy load and doubts his own abilities to help shoulder it; he also finds killing difficult, even when the targets are the lumbering, “slow and low” zombies who constitute one evolutionary branch in Garland’s rage virus–infected universe. The other new infected variant is the alphas, behemoths who preside over their feral, roving packs and may or may not be operating with more intelligence behind their bloodshot eyes.
The first section of 28 Years Later is basically an extended stalk-and-chase sequence with Jamie and Alfie trying to make it out of their male-bonding ritual alive. (Another line from Kipling: “If you let your eyes drop, they’ll get atop o’ you.”) Where things start to get interesting is upon the return to the island, which Alfie is indeed seeing through new eyes. Instead of being radicalized to defend his community, he sees himself as a protector for his mom and decides that the only way to help her—instead of just waiting around for her to die—is to sneak back to the mainland in search of a doctor, Kelson, whose reputation as a lone nut proves an irresistible lure. Where the father-son passages are tense and pressurized like they’re from a thriller, Alfie’s second foray into the forest is like a fairy tale or a vision quest.
That sense of weirdness carries through Garland’s detour into paramilitary iconography and also when the infected reappear and start displaying behavior that’s not only unprecedented for the series but also connected to the underlying motif of family bonds and how they become strengthened and severed under duress. There’s at least one set piece aboard an abandoned, stationary train that’s so outrageous—in both concept and execution—that it threatens to send the movie off the rails. More horror movies could stand to take risks like this, and it’s thrilling to watch filmmakers throwing caution to the wind without losing their nerve. The actors also rise to the occasion: Williams, who was 13 when the film was shot, is suitably quiet and sad, and he has excellent scene partners in Taylor-Johnson and Comer, each of whom claws out from under their respective parental archetypes. Meanwhile, the less said about Ralph Fiennes’s late-in-the-game appearance the better, but it’s a role that makes use of his most underrated quality—the ability to portray a halting, controlled sort of tenderness—while bumping up against some phenomenally morbid comedy.
It’s during Fiennes’s screen time that 28 Years Later arrives at and scales its peak. What makes the tableau work—propelling the film past the ridiculous and toward the sublime—is how it somehow builds up and strips away subtext at the same time: It’s hard to take because it’s easy to understand, and vice versa. It’s interesting to juxtapose the film’s humane, poetic invocation of “memento mori” with the trying to hard tactics of Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck, made by a horror director seeking prestige status; 28 Years Later, by contrast, accrues gravitas precisely because it doesn’t waste time chasing after respectability.
On that note, there’s going to be plenty said about the movie’s final scene, which reveals Boyle’s franchise ambitions (a sequel, titled 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, was shot back-to-back and is currently in postproduction) and arguably ends up undermining all the rich, ambivalent emotions brought forth before it. It is extremely goofy, yet the more I’ve thought about it since walking out of the theater, the more I feel inclined to give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt. They’re playing the long game, which means that it’s also their prerogative to rewrite the rules as they go along. The prevailing theme of 28 Days Later was always about our collective and bloodthirsty appetite for destruction so kudos to Boyle and his merry band for crafting a follow-up that leaves us wanting more even as it lingers in the throat.
