A group of survivors of the zombie-like rage virus epidemic has survived for decades on a quarantined island off the coast of England in 28 Years Later, opening in Prague and cinemas worldwide this weekend. This long-awaited sequel from 28 Days Later screenwriter Alex Garland and director Danny Boyle isn’t quite as innovative as the original 2002 film, or as intense as 2007 sequel 28 Weeks Later, but it works on deeper, more theological levels, and does such a terrific job of world-building that it leaves us on the edge of our seats awaiting the next installment. Hopefully, we don’t have to wait another two decades to get it.
28 Years Later doesn’t waste any time establishing its tone: it opens with a scene of young children, in tears watching Teletubbies, getting slaughtered by rage zombies as blood splatters the TV screen. This scene is set during the early days of the epidemic, and young Jimmy (Rocco Haynes) is the only one to make it out of the room. He flees to find his father, the local pastor, in prayer at the altar just before the zombies deliver him unto evil.
Strangely, 28 Years Later does not follow Jimmy—we only meet him again in a brief scene at the very end of the movie, now played by Jack O’Connell. But this opening scene plays into the film’s themes of faith and the embrace of one’s own death, which Ralph Fiennes expands upon in the film’s finest moments as the kindly former doctor Kelson. Memento mori. Remember that you must die.
It’s an especially profound concept for a zombie horror movie: to overcome our fear of the terrifying things that may kill us in this world, we must first accept our own inevitable demise. It’s not the drooling alpha zombie with a massive dong ripping people’s heads off that you need to overcome—it’s your own, quite natural, fear of him.
Nearly three decades after the events of the original films, the UK has become a quarantined island as life, presumably, goes on as usual elsewhere in the world. 28 Years Later focuses on a settlement of survivors on the real-life Holy Island off the coast of Northern England, which is only reachable by foot during an hours-long window of low tide that reveals a carefully guarded narrow path. This, of course, will lead to thrilling scenes of characters racing to make it home, pursued by rage zombies.
In this small, self-sufficient community lives 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams), whose mother Isla (Jodie Comer) is bedridden with an unknown disease and whose father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) plans to take him on an expedition to the mainland despite his young age. Spike is able to cleanly take down a crawling, morbidly obese zombie with an arrow to the neck, but he hesitates when pursued by a group of infected runners. When an alpha—a stronger and perhaps more chillingly smarter variant—blocks their route home, they need to improvise.
Since there’s no doctor on the island, Isla is left to suffer in silence. But Spike spots a fire during his expedition to the mainland, and grandfather Sam (Christopher Fulford) tells him stories of his former GP, Kelson, who went mad but has apparently survived by himself all these years. After seeing his father with another woman, Spike plots his own expedition to the mainland with his mother, to find the doctor and cure her of her ills.
Kelson has spent decades honoring the dead through massive towers of bleached skulls and bones that may have been inspired by Czechia’s “Bone Church” (the Sedlec Ossuary in Kutná Hora). He’s the soul of 28 Years Later, played by Fiennes with a gentleness that belies the intense terror that surrounds him: he takes the rage-fueled infected as they are, and approaches even the terrifying alpha he has named Samson with a kind of genuine curiosity.
While 28 Years Later touches on themes of mortality, it also revives the series’ core metaphor: rage as a contagious force. In an age of viral outrage and online fury, the infected mirror how easily unchecked anger can consume us. The new alpha zombies, more violent and calculating and disturbingly nude, also seem to embody toxic masculinity—a physical weaponization of brute strength and domination.
Alongside Fiennes, Taylor-Johnson and Comer deliver some fine work here, but it’s young Williams, in a captivating lead turn, who carries the weight of the narrative. Edvin Ryding adds some brief levity as Erik, a Swedish soldier who has been marooned in England after his patrolling ship washed ashore. He greets Spike with an amusingly modern sensibility, but Garland and Boyle are quick to remind us that there’s little room for humor in this world.
28 Years Later boasts some gorgeous widescreen cinematography throughout the hills and coasts of rural England by Anthony Dod Mantle, which nicely contrasts with his rough early digital video work in the original film: incredibly, the film was shot with iPhones, showcasing just how far the technology has come. In early scenes, Boyle also directs early scenes with a rough intensity that reflects the 2002 film—jarring edits, grainy stock footage, and even Rudyard Kipling’s Boots narrated over the soundtrack—though he largely abandons this during the film’s second half.
While this movie is not as scary or intense as the earlier films—an evocative soundtrack by Young Fathers doesn’t quite live up to John Murphy’s unforgettable work in the earlier film, so good it was reused in countless other movies, trailers, and ads—it is satisfying on other, deeper levels, and leaves us wanting more. Perhaps too much more: numerous storylines are left unresolved or undeveloped, though there are some fleeting clues hidden throughout the narrative.
Though not as viscerally terrifying as its predecessors, 28 Years Later lingers in the mind thanks to its philosophical depth, striking imagery, and a haunting performance by Fiennes. It trades brute force for quiet reflection, bloodcurdling terror for existential dread. Two sequels currently in production—including Nia DaCosta‘s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, due out next year—can’t come soon enough.
