‘28 Years Later’ Review

A lot has happened in the world since ‘28 Days Later’ was released in 2002. Technology has rapidly evolved, wars have come and gone and come again, politics has become an even greater theater of conflict. After more than twenty years away, director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland return to this zombie infested world with ‘28 Years Later’, a thoughtful and thrilling horror that internalizes all of the global turmoil of the preceding decades while delivering a survival thriller with striking immediacy and human drama.

‘28 Years Later’ opens in Scotland with a group of children watching ‘Teletubbies’ in a cramped living room. An adult pops in to tell them not to leave the room under any circumstances. The children fixate on the television, their faces getting progressively more scared, until the infected break in and attack. A young boy escapes, watching his entire family die violent deaths as he does so.

The world is set: this is a cruel world where not even children will be spared from its horrors.

The remainder of the film, as you might have guessed, takes place 28 years after the initial zombie outbreak in a world where Great Britain is quarantined from continental Europe and the survivors are forced to forge their own communities. One such community is an island village where a twelve year old boy named Spike (Alfie Williams) is raised by his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and a mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), who is bedridden with an unknown illness. The island is connected to the mainland by a land bridge that is only accessible during low tide. Jamie brings his son across to the mainland to get his first kill, a rite of passage in this new world. Following a child who is learning how the world works is a clever way of organically layering in exposition as to how the island community operates and how the mainland threats behave.

Danny Boyle directs the film with the frenetic energy he brought to the original so many years ago. The edits are violent and disorienting, accelerating in the most chaotic scenes to reflect the adrenaline soaked insanity required to survive in the face of a zombie attack. Boyle delivers images of idyllic beauty as well as grotesque horror, he inserts montages tying the current band of survivors efforts to combat the zombie infestation into the larger fabric of humanity’s efforts to survive in warfare throughout history. It is a stunning achievement, making the universe of this film both bigger and smaller: bigger in its world building, in its political and religious themes, its commentary on post-Brexit modernity, but smaller such that it is ultimately one boy’s story of coming of age and evaluating his parents with fresh eyes in a broken world.

Throughout the film, the acting is impeccable, even as the performers are tasked with deftly handling a variety of tones. This is a zombie thriller, but there is also heart and humor, tragedy and, yes, fear. Each member of the cast delivers a wonderful, nuanced performance, with Ralph Fiennes popping in and delivering the kind of small, beautiful role that would elevate a movie of any genre, but because it takes place in a horror film it will be completely ignored come awards season.

There are bigger names in the film, but ultimately ‘28 Years Later’ rests almost entirely on the shoulders of the child actor, Alfie Williams, and he rises to the occasion. We see this world for the first time just as he does, we feel his fear as he experiences the zombie threat, we see his anger and heartache as he begins to see his parents as everyday people, with their own flaws, for the first time. Williams is in virtually every scene of the movie, and a lesser performer would have compromised the entire the film, and yet the fact that ‘28 Years Later’ works as well as it does, with its myriad tonal shifts, is a testament to Williams’s fantastic performance.

This is the third film in the ‘28’ franchise, but you can enjoy it as a standalone without having seen the previous films. This is also the first in a new duology, and yet Boyle and Garland deliver a self contained film that leaves enough breadcrumbs to set up the forthcoming sequel while still closing out its own story. So many movies in recent years feel like extended trailers for the next one (looking at you, ‘Fast X’), but the open ended questions in this film add a level of depth and intrigue to this confused, discombobulated world such that the film is still satisfying even if these questions are never addressed in a future installment.

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s return to the rage infested world they created in 2002 is a thrilling achievement, expansive without losing sight of the human element, telling a story of a boy’s loss of innocence in a world that lost its innocence long ago. What it lacks in genuine scares it more than makes up for with its thrilling mixture of drama, suspense and action; all up against zombie infused mayhem.

28 Years Later
Rated R for strong bloody violence, grisly images, graphic nudity, language, and brief sexuality.
Running Time: 1 hour and 55 minutes

Director Danny Boyle
Writers Alex Garland
Stars Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ralph Fiennes
Rating R
Running Time 115 Minutes
Genres Horror, Thriller