Released in 2002, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 28 Days Later breathed new life into the moribund ‘zombie movie’ genre – even though its rage-virus victims weren’t ‘zombies’ in the traditional undead sense. The film was tough, gritty, bleak, and utterly nihilistic, helped in no small part by its digital filming giving it a grainy, almost documentary feel.
2007’s sequel 28 Weeks Later, directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, was an enjoyable if more workmanlike traditional contemporary horror movie, complete with parachuted-in Hollywood movie stars like Jeremy Renner and Rose Byrne.
But now, 23 years after the original (it’s close enough), the Boyle and Garland dream team (or should that be nightmare team?) are back with 28 Years Later, a film that’s very much the spiritual successor to 28 Days Later. It shares the original film’s visceral, uncompromising DNA, primarily employing iPhone Max cameras to create a visual style that evokes 28 Days Later to deliver a film that has little of the gloss and sheen of budget-bloated mainstream genre movies, throwing the audience into a gruelling world of privation, death, disease, and spectacular uber-violence.
28 Years Later is the film that Brexit and the COVID pandemic built. Nearly two decades after the initial rage virus outbreak, the European mainland has kept itself free from infection, and the UK has been isolated and quarantined; survivors of the initial outbreak left to fend for themselves in their broken country.
On an isolated enclave on a small island cut off from the mainland by a single well-defended tidal causeway, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) takes his twelve-year old son Spike (Alfie Williams) to the mainland as a sort of rites-of-passage initiation where he will learn how to defend himself and kill the infected that now roam the countryside unhindered. Spike is more concerned for his mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), who is seriously ill; she’s in constant pain and she drifts in and out of both consciousness and lucidity.
On the mainland, Jamie and Spike quickly encounter not just the usual emaciated, festering rage victims but also more evolved Alphas that seem to have developed rudimentary thinking skills, and grotesque, devolved, bloated creatures that squirm across the ground devouring worms and random insect life. Hiding away in an abandoned cottage, they see the glow of a distant fire on the horizon. Returning to the island, Spike learns that the bonfire was created by Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), a former doctor assumed to have gone mad when an earlier expedition from the island witnessed him collecting and then ritualistically incinerating bodies. Spike convinces himself that a doctor may be able to help his ailing mother, and he sneaks back out onto the mainland with Isla in search of Kelson…
28 Years Later is a powerful and deeply affecting movie that has more to offer than just random scenes of the hapless infected being slaughtered. Obviously, there are many well-staged set pieces. Still, they’re very much in service to the story of one small family unit surviving hand-to-mouth in a bitter and unforgiving environment. This is very much Spike’s story, a young boy forced to become a man in a world that offers nothing but pain and misery. Indeed, the film belongs to Alfie Williams, whose wonderfully naturalistic performance sees him develop from a frightened child into a young adult who steps up when his feckless father inevitably disappoints. It’s an astonishing performance from such a young talent, and there are times, particularly in the final act, when he’ll very likely break your heart.
Taylor-Johnson and Comer are good value – even if both are missing from the film for significant chunks – but Ralph Fiennes inevitably commands the screen as Kelson who, smothered in iodine to keep the effects of the virus at bay, isn’t quite what we might have expected and is doing his bit to keep the spirit of humanity alive.
It’s a raw, biting film that pulls no punches in its depiction of this desperate, ugly world and the terrible dangers and creatures that now inhabit it. It isn’t perfect, of course – the idea of the UK absolutely isolated and abandoned to its fate seems a bit extreme even in a post-Brexit world, the pace wobbles in one or two places, and the extraordinary wtf? final sequence might be a tonal jolt too much for many. But ultimately, this is Boyle and Garland firing on all cylinders – revisiting a world they created at the turn of the century and finding it, not unlike the real world, a much darker, colder, and unremittingly disturbing place. We’re already counting down the days to the January release of the Bone Palace sequel.
28 YEARS LATER is on general release now.
