In 2002, the filmmaker then best known for Trainspotting breathed new life into the zombie genre. Let’s not quibble over whether the Infected in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later count as “zombies” — they’re not actually dead, no, but all the same paranoid tropes are there. In the wake of 9/11, Boyle’s images of a devastated London resonated disturbingly, and the movie had a kinetic, ripped-from-the-headlines style and a pace that didn’t let up. The 2007 sequel 28 Weeks Later did well enough to justify the announcement of 28 Months Later, which never materialized.
Instead, nearly a quarter-century after the original film, Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland returned for 28 Years Later. The trailer went viral, thanks largely to its audio — an actor’s reading of Rudyard Kipling’s 1903 war poem “Boots,” which became an unlikely anthem of 21st-century political resistance. That grim chant is hard to shake, but what about the movie itself? After “The Walking Dead,” “The Last of Us,” Train to Busan and countless video games, are zombie apocalypses played out?
The deal
Twenty-eight years after the Rage virus swept through the UK, turning Infected people into shrieking, mindless attackers, the island remains in quarantine. While life continues as usual elsewhere in Europe, an isolated community of survivors subsists in premodern conditions on the tidal island of Lindisfarne.
There are no doctors to help Isla (Jodie Comer), who has a mysterious ailment. When her 12-year-old son, Spike (Alfie Williams), makes his first trip to the mainland under the guidance of his dad, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), they’re reminded of the group’s ironclad rule: If you don’t return from an expedition, don’t expect a rescue party.
Schooled in archery, Spike successfully kills a creeping Infected known as a “slow low,” but then he and his dad encounter a preternaturally strong one, or Alpha (Chi Lewis-Parry), and barely escape alive. Back on the island, Spike wonders if Jamie told him the whole truth about the apparent settlement they glimpsed down the coast. Desperate to help his mother, he makes a choice that could seal both their fates.
Will you like it?
The prominence of the “Boots” audio on the soundtrack suggests that 28 Years Later is a war movie — and it is, for a while. In the film’s first half, Boyle punctuates Jamie and Spike’s adventure with flashes of archival and cinematic footage that evoke the whole history of bloodshed on English soil. Combine this with rapidly cut digital action (the iPhone 15 Pro Max was the main camera used), and you get a surreal vision of constant combat. Edginess is practically bred into the residents of Lindisfarne, whose fear of outsiders has obvious real-world parallels.
The second half of the movie retains the trancey mood (enhanced by a Young Fathers score), but the plot veers off in a new direction. Raised for war, young Spike yearns for something else. When his dad exaggerates their exploits to the other villagers, he turns away in disgust. His mother is his center of gravity, her fraying mental and physical state his obsession.
Mother and son set out on a second quest with a very different tone from the first, its goal not killing but healing. The Infected become less antagonists than mere obstacles, lost in the dreamy, unspoiled beauty of the Northumbrian landscape. When actual soldiers show up — marooned Swedish troops sporting modern weaponry and cellphones — the movie’s contempt for them is plain.
After having directed Civil War and codirected this year’s Warfare, Garland seems to crave a rest from battle. Influenced by Ken Loach’s socially conscious coming-of-age film Kes, he has said, his script for 28 Years Later focuses instead on the exhaustion and aftermath of war: grief, memorials, hope springing eternal.
Williams and Comer have a believable, sensitive mother-son rapport, and Ralph Fiennes shows up eventually to deliver a quietly showstopping performance. But the movie is less about the characters than about sweeping us up in its feverish vision of apocalypse and rebirth.
28 Years Later is the kind of movie in which flowery fields and a newborn baby serve unironically as symbols of hope. It’s also the kind of movie in which a “Teletubbies” clip sets up a brutal massacre, and people’s heads routinely get yanked right off. As in the Mad Max universe, the grittiness, the wacky dark humor and the sentimentality never cancel each other out. 28 Years Later is more trippy than scary, and its disjointed story is clearly setting up a sequel (due out in January). But Boyle’s sound and fury are immersive enough to send us out feeling genuinely shell-shocked.
If you like this, try…
28 Days Later (2002; Pluto TV, rentable): With a chilling opening similar to that of “The Walking Dead,” the original launched not only Boyle and Garland but also star Cillian Murphy into the mainstream.
28 Weeks Later (2007; Disney+, Hulu, Tubi, rentable): Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo stepped in for the sequel, in which refugees return to the UK after the Infected (mostly) die of starvation. What happens next sets up the third installment.
Land of the Dead (2005; rentable): The progenitor of modern zombie horror, George A. Romero, got in on the revival with this class-conscious B movie that takes place in a Pittsburgh besieged by zombies — an “island” setting similar to that of 28 Years Later. Romero subsequently made Diary of the Dead and Survival of the Dead before his death in 2017.
This article appears in Jul 2-8, 2025.
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