“28 Years Later” is the daring third installment in the post-apocalyptic horror franchise that includes “28 Days Later” and “28 Weeks Later.” The film sees the reunion of director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland, who collaborated on the original “28 Days Later” as well as the sci-fi thriller “Sunshine.”
In the first film, the “Rage Virus” — a highly contagious virus that turns humans into rabid, bloodthirsty killers — is accidentally leaked from a lab by animal rights activists, triggering the rapid collapse of British society. “28 Weeks Later” follows the efforts of occupying-NATO forces to resettle the United Kingdom but ends in a second outbreak that once again envelops the island.
“28 Years Later” introduces a new cast of characters led by 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams), his father Jamie (Aaron-Taylor Johnson) and his mother Isla (Jodie Comer). The family lives with a small community of survivors on Lindisfarne, a tidal island connected to the British mainland by a narrow causeway.
Text at the beginning reveals that the virus has been contained to the British Isles, whose inhabitants are subject to a permanent quarantine, while the rest of the world has gone on living mostly unaffected. Later in the film, Spike and Isla encounter a stranded Swedish soldier (Edvin Ryving) who makes references to hallmarks of modern life — delivery drivers, the Internet and social media — all of which are foreign to them.
Isolating the infection to one country is one of the many striking creative choices that differentiate “28 Years Later” from other zombie fare. While the world has advanced into the modern age, the quarantined British Islanders have regressed to medieval living standards. Similarly, Alex Garland’s “Civil War,” was compelling in part because it transposed recognizable imagery from conflicts in developing countries onto the United States — a technique just as effective here. The world’s indifference to the surviving natives reflects passivity toward impoverished and war-torn regions in the real world. Boyle also acknowledges Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic as thematic influences on the film’s depiction of an isolated, abandoned nation, making the film feel especially timely.
The opening sequence of “28 Years Later” is a flashback to the virus’s outbreak in 2002. A young boy named Jimmy narrowly escapes the infected by fleeing to a church where he finds his father, the local vicar, who welcomes the virus as the advent of judgement day. His father hands him a cross before allowing himself to be devoured, introducing religion and ritual as key themes of the film.
Although it lacks the urgency of the more traditional survival story in “28 Days Later,” the sequel’s more meditative pace allows for stronger characterization, raising questions about death, family, religion and more. The main plot kicks off with Spike’s first journey to the mainland. Despite the village elders’ warning to wait a few years until Spike is 14 or 15, Jamie intends to toughen up his son and teach him to kill the infected. When the journey goes awry, the two find themselves fleeing from hordes of infected. The virus has clearly evolved and mutated since the outbreak, and the line between human and infected has begun to blur. The film introduces a superior variant of the infected known as “alphas” who seem to serve as leaders and exhibit strangely ritualistic behaviors, such as tearing the head and spinal cord from a deer, “Predator”-style.
Spike soon embarks on a journey to save his mother, whose severe fits of hallucination and confusion cannot be diagnosed by the townspeople. After observing one of his mysterious bonfires, Spike learns of former general practitioner Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who is rumored to have gone insane. Against his father’s warnings, Spike brings Isla along to find the doctor, who lives alone on the mainland, in hopes of getting her treatment.
As impressive as it is original, Boyle’s direction takes huge artistic swings that differentiate the film from other contemporary genre films. The scene in which Spike first leaves the island with Jamie, for example, is intercut with documentary footage from World War I and shots from Laurence Olivier’s “Henry V” as an audio recording of Rudyard Kipling’s 1903 poem “Boots” blares. The sequence envisions Spike’s training as part of a long history of British militarism, offering an unexpected critique of the violence employed by the survivors of the “Rage Virus.”
Furthermore, the action scenes are edited with Boyle’s signature energy and kineticism, using quick cuts, freeze frames and close-up angles throughout. It’s all a little disorienting — deliberately so — and it makes “28 Years Later” look and feel unlike any other blockbuster.
The film’s action consists mostly of characters walking from one place to another, occasionally interrupted by prowling infected. Returning cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle shot the original “28 Days Later” using grainy digital camcorders, giving the impression that it might have been shot by a random passerby in 2002. In “28 Years Later,” Mantle updated this technique for the 2020s by shooting primarily with the iPhone 15. The small camera size offered a high degree of maneuverability, allowing for frenetic close-ups of the action that feel torn from a documentary YouTube video. One particularly stylish flourish is a riff on “bullet-time” from “The Matrix,” the slow motion camera movements that show characters dodging bullets. When arrows strike the infected in “28 Years Later,” the shot freezes, whips to a new angle, then continues. The ambient footage of the infected mindlessly wandering the countryside and looking for food is so compelling because it looks like a nature documentary — except the animals were once human. Elsewhere, there are nighttime infrared shots of the infected devouring a deer that are particularly disturbing and sure to stay in the audience’s memory.
“28 Years Later” distinguishes itself from all other zombie or thriller films, including its own predecessors. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland have constructed a bizarre, contemplative and energetic fable with weighty themes and ample scares. Although part of its existing franchise, the film is also the first part of a planned trilogy set to be followed by “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” in January 2026. As such, the story remains largely incomplete and depends on its future films to be considered entirely successful. Still, this masterful installment delivers a much-needed stylistic jolt to filmmaking conventions and more than warrants viewing in a theater — even if only for how unabashedly bold it is.