28 years later review

I’M NOT QUITE SURE why it took me so long to twig what the main allegorical subtext of Danny Boyle’s new film, 28 Years Later, really was. I did know, of course, that it’s the follow-up to his now iconic lo-fi zombiepocalypse movie 28 Days Later, written by Alex Garland and released in 2002 (there has already been a less iconic but more immediate follow-up in 2007, 28 Weeks Later, which they did not write and direct), in which Cillian Murphy starred as bike courier who wakes up from a coma to find that a mysterious sickness – the “Rage” virus – has turned the population of Britain into speedy, staggering flesh-hungry monsters. Possibly I didn’t twig because, of late, there have been such rich pickings.

Since 28 Days Later, we’ve had an actual mysterious contagion that has swept across the country, and indeed the world. We’ve now seen, at least in photographs, if we were doing what we were told, the eerily empty London street-scenes that made the impact of that film – Murphy in hospital scrubs on a deserted Westminster Bridge – so effective. We’ve also had Brexit, a tangible moment of societal rage, in which the British public was split, pretty much exactly, in half, and turned, baying for blood, on each other (and the immigrants, let’s not forget the immigrants).

Clearly Boyle’s new film, and Garland’s script, has been able to make use of both events, plus our general British societal downturn – it features at least a couple of shots of a tattered St George’s flag – but their main target, and one that has also been something of an international scourge of late: men. Not all men, of course, but the male behaviours that have made “toxic masculinity” a recognisable concept and, at least as far as the internet has concerned, a devastatingly popular one. But we’ll get to that.

The film begins 28 years after the events of the first movie, ie. 2002, so we can assume we’re a good five years on from our present day. On which note, enjoy it while you can, folks, because according to the Boyle/Garland vision things are looking bleak. Britain is now so much of an infected zone that it has been cut off from the rest of Europe (imagine that!) and left to fend for itself. Nature has reclaimed towns and cities, leaving only pockets of survivors who have learned to live in a more primitive way and to scavenge where they can.

Twelve-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) and his father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor Johnson) live on Holy Island – more familiar to some as Lindisfarne – an island in the northeast of England that is made safer from the flesh-eaters by the fact that it is only accessible via a heavily guarded causeway that is exposed at low tide. There, the small, folky society has reorganised itself along traditional gender lines: the men turn the arrows and fend off the zombies (although yes, they’re not dead so they’re not technically zombies, they’re “the infected”); the women sew the welcome banners and serve the tea.

After a brief flashback sequence, the import of which becomes clear in the closing scenes, the film begins on a momentous day: Spike and his dad are taking Spike’s first trip to the mainland, for reasons that are not entirely clear. They’ve got a quiver full of arrows each, dad’s wearing his rather fetching London Fire Brigade jacket, and they’re heading off into the forest to see who they come across. Because no, this is not an essential resource-finding mission it turns out, but a symbolic one: Spike is off to get his first kill.

That kill comes quickly, but also slowly, because the infected have now diversified. As well as the regular infected, who hurtle naked down hillsides like Jethro Tull fans in the Isle of Wight in 1970, there are also slow ones – bloated bodies who crawl along the ground and slurp earthworms – and also, most importantly, big ones. These big ones are known to the Holy Island folk as “alphas”, because they are taller, stronger, harder to kill and like to rip heads clean off with spinal cords still attached (they also, quite literally, wave their willies). Which is when the penny dropped.

As well as a father, Spike has a mother, played by Jodie Comer, Isla, who is in bed upstairs with an undiagnosed illness. At first it seems worryingly like she might stay there, underused like Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon, although Scorsese was admittedly at the mercy of historical fact, but Boyle and Garland have plans. Though 28 Years Later might be set up – and even sold, if you enjoyed the trailer, with its haunting 1915 recording of actor Taylor Holmes reading Rudyard Kipling’s Boer War poem, “Boots” – as a celebration of masculine derring-do, it is in fact almost the opposite. (The “Men – men – men – men, men go mad with watchin’ em” line of the poem might also have been a clue.)

At Spike’s homecoming celebrations to Holy Island, he sees a side of his father that makes him question, and then doubt, some of the morals Jamie espouses. At this point, roughly halfway through, this film flips: it’s not a father-and-son quest after all, it’s about a young boy and his mother, and championing the softer, more intuitive qualities of both. The causeway that links the island to the mainland is not a pathway to macho exploits; it is, in fact, symbolic of a different kind of rite of passage – and this point is made more explicit by an interaction with a pregnant infected, not to mention that fact of his mother’s name – it’s an umbilical cord.

Thematically, 28 Years Later might seem more of a piece with Alex Garland’s 2022 folk-horror film Men, in which Jessie Buckley fended off a series of identical male aggressors in the English countryside; but though this film doesn’t hide its agenda, it is carefully non-didactic and offers plenty of purely cinematic appeal. A chase sequence on the causeway is both pulse-quickening and beautiful; Ralph Fiennes, when he finally emerges as a mysterious doctor who lives in a sculpture park of bones and paints his body in iodine, like Colonel Kurtz-crossed with the Tango Man, is a scenery-chewing hoot.

(The film also has an ending which is so surprising, both tonally and visually, that many of the reviewers at the screening I was at actually guffawed – in delight, at least in my case – but it would be no fun to reveal any more than that. But what is clear is that there’s more to come.)

So yes, 28 years later, much has obviously changed. And, as would be expected, and as we have all seen, mostly for the significantly worse. This tightly constructed sequel though, with its energetic, fondly nostalgic direction, occasionally incongruous but always lively soundtrack from Young Fathers, and a reassuringly high-calibre cast, comes with new ideas and enough thought-provoking surprises to allow just a small amount of hope.

28 Years Later is out in Australian cinemas now.

This story originally appeared on Esquire UK.

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