28 Years Later review: Danny Boyle's rattling zombie epic never lets up in pace or invention

Irish Times

18-06-2025

28 Years Later
    
Director
:
Danny Boyle
Cert
:
16
Starring
:
Alfie Williams, Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ralph Fiennes, Jack O'Connell, Edvin Ryding
Running Time
:
1 hr 55 mins
It has actually been a mere 18 years since Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's decent 28 Weeks Later followed up what might be
Danny Boyle
's most influential film. Shot on scuzzy-looking digital video, 28 Days Later, a breakout hit in 2002, inveigled a then-novel off-the-cuff sensibility into mainstream cinema.
The cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle honours his own innovative work back then – and moves things forward – by shooting most of the current zombie epic on an iPhone with attachments. The rich, allusive, aggressively English result, with Boyle back as director, finds fresh things to say with the disgusting lore while keeping comfortably between the franchise's guardrails.
Boyle and his screenwriter Alex Garland look to be gesturing a thumb at one significant real-world event that convulsed England over those 18 years. It seems the rage virus, after escaping to France at the close of the last film, has now been beaten back to Britain. At least one island off the northeast coast has found a way of existing in quasi-normal isolation. A causeway, passable only at low tide, connects the citizens to a land pounded by the familiar dashing ghouls and now oozed upon by fatter, more sluggish undead.
The film-makers have bleak fun with what the island community has become. Taylor Holmes's 1915 reading of Rudyard Kipling's Boots, honouring British troops in the second Boer War, accompanies archive footage of proud Englishman gearing up to save the world in the 1940s. On the island, the survivors drink warm beer beneath an image of Queen Elizabeth II at the time of her coronation (or thereabouts). Meanwhile, vessels from the European mainland circle, hoping to enforce an understandable quarantine.
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So Europe continues to move through the 21st century while Britain retreats into animalistic brutality and 1950s cosplay. Can you see what it is yet? To be fair to writer and director, it requires no awareness of that Brexit analogy to enjoy a rattling quest narrative that never lets up in pace or invention.
Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a tough scavenger, and Spike (Alfie Williams), his spirited son, live in a state of fretful toil. Isla (
Jodie Comer
), wife to one and mother to the other, struggles with an apparently unstoppable disease that causes her to forget what has become of the world.
On a first trip to the mainland with Dad – a sort of first-blood ritual – Spike spots a fire in the distance and later learns that it marks the encampment of a deranged former GP. Against the advice of Jamie, he takes mother to meet this Dr Kelson (
Ralph Fiennes
) with a mind to curing her ailment. Time will tell if Kelson has, as initially seems likely, become the series' Mr Kurtz.
What most sticks in the brain is the film's incidental meditation on the mythology of England from distant past to speculated future. In this timeline the Sycamore Gap tree,
felled by vandals
in 2023, still stands in Northumberland. Isla tells that her dad believed Antony Gormley's Angel of the North, now overgrown, would endure as long as Stonehenge. No surprise from the film-maker who devised that oblique take on British patriotism for the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games.
Boyle knows that 28 Days fans, though happy to enjoy all that padding, will expect some grade-A gore from such an entertainment. There is no shortage of beheadings and eviscerations. The implied promise of a chase along the causeway as tides rise is honoured. The momentum continues right up to – fair warning seems required – an open ending that will leave most panting for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. That film will be with us in January 2026.
In cinemas from Thursday, June 19th