28 Years Later review: 'wild and radical'

28 Years Later (15) ★★★★

First released in 2002, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 28 Days Later helped reinvigorate the zombie film with its super-fast “infected”, its pioneering use of digital video and its none-too-subtle warning about the hell-zone Britain might become if it didn’t keep its isolationist proclivities in check. Post-Brexit, post-Covid, and with the political landscape increasingly hostile, it’s hardly surprising Boyle, Garland and producer Andrew Macdonald have chosen to revisit the franchise with 28 Years Later, an almost real-time sequel that follows on from the first film and its 2007 follow-up 28 Weeks Later.

28 Years Later | Sony Pictures

Though neither Boyle nor Garland were much involved with that last film, it kept its Brit-centric focus right up until the final minute, when the infected made it to Paris. With the new film, however, Boyle and co have smartly opted to make the infected a uniquely British problem once again: after a Highlands-set prologue foregrounds the hallucinatory tone the film will take in its later stages (it involves a zombie attack against the backdrop of the Teletubbies — a very Boyle move), a short bit of expository text informs us that Europe was successful in pushing the Rage-infected zombie hoards back all those years ago. Britain has been quarantined ever since, its coastlines patrolled by the navies of Europe, its surviving population left to fend for themselves.

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It’s a neat way to contain the plot as we pick-up the titular story in the Northeast of England with a group of survivors living in a fortress on Holy Island. Connected to the mainland via a causeway that’s only walkable twice a day, their own isolation has further warped their perception of the world, making them prone to xenophobic cracks about the French and overly invested in promulgating their own myths and lies about what’s really going on.

28 Years Later | Sony Pictures

We see all this through the eyes of the film’s 12-year-old protagonist Spike (Alfie Williams - excellent), who starts to see through his dad’s hunter-gatherer bravado (his dad is played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson) while on a rites-of-passage excursion to the mainland to get his first zombie kill. Here, Boyle re-acquaints us with the series’ sense of dread with a couple of gnarly set-pieces that subvert the usual dank, grimy tropes of apocalyptic cinema by intercutting scenes of bucolic wonder with both archival footage of classic British films and blood-red night-vision shots that show the evolution of the infected.

It’s pretty wild and radical stuff, like a well-financed B-movie infected with the spirit of one of Powell and Pressburger’s myth-interrogating flights of fancy. And that sense of strangeness continues as the focus of the story shifts from a father-son tale to a mother-son tale, with Jodie Comer brilliant as Spike’s ailing, confused mum whose undiagnosed illness motivates Spike to sneak her onto the mainland in search of a Kurtz-like doctor (Ralph Fiennes) rumoured to have lost his mind.

For all the ensuing parallels with Apocalypse Now, though, Boyle makes it his own, even inverting Trainspotting’s ironic “Choose Life” mantra with a meditation on the inevitability of death and an acceptance of mortality. The end result is one of the more robust and vital legacy sequels of recent years — and reconfirms Boyle as one of the most vibrant British directors out there.

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