28 Years Later and the Social Life of Catastrophe
The latest installment of the 28 Days Later franchise returns with more than zombies — it explores the strange new norms that follow collapse. It’s a vision of survival horror that focuses not just on the infected but on the ways humanity adapts.
Alfie Williams, Jodie Comer, and Ralph Fiennes start in 28 Years Later. (Sony Pictures)
There’s a harrowing prologue to 28 Years Later that immediately alerts the audience to the film’s deliberately disorienting narrative and style. It doesn’t pay off until the final, brief scene — and even then only works if you’ve been tracking the significance of a cross necklace that passes from the hands of a dying Anglican priest to a traumatized blonde boy, his son, who reappears at the end as a very peculiar blonde man.
What happened to make the boy grow up to be such a strange fellow? Well, living through a zombie apocalypse does all sorts of things to people.
And yeah, I know — they’re not technically zombies, as director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland keep insisting in interviews. If you recall the highly influential first apocalyptic horror film in the series created by Boyle and Garland, 28 Days Later (2002) — and who among us does not? — you know they’re the “infected,” carriers of the “rage virus” that kicked off a catastrophic modern pandemic across the United Kingdom, leaving few survivors.
The prologue puts the film’s focus on children growing up in a time of horror and how they’re warped by their parents within the confines of small survivor communities. As in 28 Days Later, the film critiques a disastrously patriarchal legacy stoked by disaster and collapse of civilization — retrograde masculinity obsessed with violent control, procreation, and the subjugation of women, with crude militarism running alongside a resurgent warrior culture.
Among the Alphas
The survivors live mostly on rural, isolated Holy Island, which has regressed to a preindustrial, agrarian state. Needless to say, there’s not a cell phone in sight — just people living in the moment. The island is the only inhabited place in England that remains outside the vigilantly guarded quarantine keeping the world safe from the victims of the “rage virus” that’s overrun the mainland. A causeway that runs between them is only available for use during low tide. And obviously, anyone who ventures onto the mainland and gets infected isn’t allowed back through the island’s stockade gate.
After the grisly prologue, which only the boy with a cross necklace survives, the main narrative begins with an entirely different, dark-haired boy named Spike (Alfie Williams), whose story opens with his trial of manhood. At age twelve, armed only with the bow and arrows that are his community’s main weapons, he’s taken to the mainland by his father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), to make his “first kill.” The challenge of this task runs a wide gamut from easy to nearly impossible, because the infected — who are the hunters’ prey — have evolved into distinct subspecies.
There are blubbery abject creatures that live on worms and resemble them in their slow wriggling crawl along the ground. There are the frothing, twitching, shrieking, red-eyed “fast zombies” from the first two films, now hunting in packs. And there are the “Alphas”: giant, muscular figures of dread, Goliaths looming up on the horizon line in beautifully scary shots that have a mythic power. In them, the virus has acted like a combination of growth hormones and steroids. Arrows merely enrage them, and it generally takes a village to bring them down.
When Spike hesitates to kill one of the infected — found tied and hung upside-down for the purposes of torture by unknown mainland survivors — Jamie urges him on, saying, “The more you kill, the easier it gets.”
Blood and Soil
The combination of religiosity and kill-happy fervor that defines rural Holy Island society puts the film in folk-horror territory, with the added creepiness of intense Anglophile nostalgia. The whole community shows up to celebrate Spike’s “first kill” with a booze-up under a faded 1950s photo of Queen Elizabeth II. Over the rustic settlement, the flag of St George flies proudly — a symbol adopted during the Crusades by the English “Christian soldiers” trying to take the Holy Land over the piled-up dead bodies of Muslims and Jews.
Lest you miss these unsubtle elements, Boyle edits in montages drawn from various chapters of English history: documentary footage of WWI soldiers on the march, a chilling 1915 recitation of Rudyard Kipling’s “Boots,” and scenes from Laurence Olivier’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V in which archers raise their bows. Their gestures reflect the arrows shot by Holy Island’s guards.
Among those marginalized by Holy Island culture is Spike’s beloved mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), who’s bedridden with an undiagnosed illness that is both physically and mentally debilitating. She protests in vain against Spike’s trial of manhood on the mainland, but her condition is so dire she sinks into confusion almost before she’s finished cursing Jamie for his irresponsibility.
No doctors have survived to treat the inhabitants of the island, and Jamie tends to Isla with a weary reluctance that suggests he’s given up on her recovery. After the trial alienates Spike from his father, the boy develops an obsession with saving his mother by taking her to the mainland, where a doctor is rumored to live among the infected.
The second trip to the mainland — bringing Spike and Isla into the strange haven created by Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) — is completely different than the first. The overwhelming presence of death, as disturbing as it is, gives rise to a reverence for life. When you first see Dr Kelson’s sky-high sculpture made out of human skulls, you’re primed to experience a ghastly encounter with a figure like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. So it’s quite a surprise when the narrative turns in a different direction — though Fiennes’s peculiar high-fluting laugh at the joy of having noninfected visitors lets you know he’s moved into his own form of high-functioning madness.
28 Years Later . . . Again
Tribute must be paid to the film for its riveting adoration of nature, which is resplendent on the mainland in the absence of rapacious human exploitation. Shooting mainly on iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max — with supplementary drones and film cameras — in Northumberland near the Scottish border, 28 Years Later celebrates the grand sweep of fields and forests, the running deer, the vast and glorious clear sky.
The film was partly inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic and the isolationist bent in English politics that led to Brexit, layering in additional thematic resonances. In short, there’s a lot going on in 28 Years Later. I didn’t mind the scattershot montages or the careening narrative because at least I was spared the deadening effects of being able to guess everything that was going to happen in advance. Its loose, episodic structure seems fitting for a world where humanity’s relentless adaptability is on full display — as both the infected and uninfected evolve in bizarre ways to meet bizarre conditions.
In general, there’s quite a split in response to 28 Years Later that probably has a lot to do with its lack of predictable “fan service”: very high scores from the critics but pretty low scores from the general public.
The abrupt way the film ends, right after introducing a whole new narrative swerve with a fresh cast of characters, displeased a lot of viewers. It signals clearly that a sequel is imminent. Garland has already written the planned trilogy. The second instalment, called 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, will be directed by Nia DaCosta (The Marvels, Candyman) — in order to “break up the boys’ club” as Boyle put it. The planned third film will be directed by Boyle again, with Cillian Murphy returning to star — if the funding comes through.
Which I hope it does. I like the scope and tension and wilder inventions of this film and want to see how the overall narrative arc plays out. I’m one of the few who appreciated the ending — its sudden jump into dark humor and action-oriented, exuberant craziness. It seemed like it was about time for that version of the human response to utter catastrophe to burst forth. And I feel that way not just about the sequels to 28 Years Later but about our situation in the United States as well.