Review: Danny Boyle's 28 Years Later is his most human horror yet

Extra.ie​

19-06-2025

There's a particular chill that runs down your spine when Danny Boyle revisits the apocalypse… and I am here for it!
28 Years Later, the long-awaited follow-up to his genre-defining 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later, hits cinemas nationwide this week, and doesn't just re-introduce us to the rage virus, but also drop us right back into a haunting world brimming with raw human emotion.
With its washed-out skylines, eerie silences, and moments of sudden, brutal motion, the film feels less like a continuation of an already beloved franchise and more like a reckoning. There's a particular chill that runs down your spine when Danny Boyle revisits the apocalypse… and I am here for it! Pic: Sony/Columbia
While this installment perfectly encapsulates the energy of those that have gone before it, Boyle returns with a matured confidence, trading some of the anarchic energy of the original for something quieter, more introspective, however no less terrifying.
Don't get me wrong, the horror here is still visceral, but it's also haunted by time and humanity.
By honing in on the stories of those who made it through, Boyle leaves the viewer with the uneasy feeling that survival might not have been the reward we once thought it was. 28 Years Later, the long-awaited follow-up to his genre-defining 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later, hits cinemas nationwide this week, and doesn't just re-introduce us to the rage virus, but also drop us right back into a haunting world brimming with raw human emotion. Pic: Columbia
While the gore riddled images of an alpha dismembering a Swedish navy seal may have stuck with me long after the screen went black, what lingered most was the fleeting glimpses of humanity beneath the horror.
28 Years Later doesn't let us forget that the infected were once just people; neighbours, lovers, parents, all caught in a wave of something bigger and more brutal than them.
The introduction of Dr Kelson's character (Ralph Fiennes) brings along with it these quiet, unspoken beats where the film finds its emotional weight, further backing the guts and gore with something much, much heavier. With its washed-out skylines, eerie silences, and moments of sudden, brutal motion, the film feels less like a continuation of an already beloved franchise and more like a reckoning. Pic: Sony/ Columbia
We're reminded, uncomfortably, how easily empathy erodes when survival becomes the only script. The infected are monsters, yes, but sadly made, not born, and perhaps it's our indifference to that fact that cuts the deepest.
I'm reminded of this most in the moment where Isla (Jodie Comer) aids one of the infected during child birth. It's one of the film's most quietly devastating scenes, a moment that momentarily suspends the terror and reminds us, almost unbearably, of what's been lost.
There's a tenderness in Isla's trembling hands, a flicker of recognition in the mother's gaze, as if both are briefly returned to something recognisably human.
Visually, Boyle plays a fascinating game with time. He weaves in grainy stock footage from wartime archives — soldiers marching, displaced families, bodies being dragged under grey skies, folding them seamlessly into the film's contemporary chaos.
At first, it jars. Then it settles into something more profound: a quiet suggestion that history is less linear than we like to think. The rage virus might be fiction, but the devastation it mirrors is all too real.
By juxtaposing these archival ghosts with the sleek dread of his regular cinematography, Boyle draws a subtle but striking line between imagined horror and remembered atrocity
How many times do we have to see a civilisation collapse before we change our ways?
I highly recommend 28 Years Later, even to those who have yet to see the other installments, not just because it's a welcomed return to one of cinema's most enduringly bleak universes, but because it's a film that dares to ask what it really means to survive.
The film's power lies not just in the blood and dread, but in the quiet, human moments that catch you off guard: a shared glance, a birth, a memory that flickers before fading.
These empathetic touches don't soften the horror — they sharpen it. They remind us that the true terror isn't just in the infected, but in what we lose when we stop seeing each other as human. Boyle has made a film that's gripping and cinematic, but also incredibly poignant in 2025.