28 Years Later Is an Ambitious, Gorgeously Somber, Never-Boring Zombie-Fest

In John Wyndham’s 1951 science-fiction novel Day of the Triffids, which screenwriter Alex Garland has cited as an inspiration for the now-classic 2002 zombie-horror reverie 28 Days Later, a mysterious green meteor shower has blinded most of the world's inhabitants—an army of giant, carnivorous creeping plants may have something to do with it, though they’re almost a red herring. A group of sighted survivors take to the English countryside to rebuild society, with all the freedom and danger such an enterprise implies. If you were free to remake your world just as you wanted it, with no influence or input from any other country or group of outsiders, would it be a utopia or a disaster?

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Wyndham’s novel is layered with strata of coziness and unease, twin moods that Garland and director Danny Boyle also evoked in 28 Days Later, in which a virus has turned much of the population into rage-fueled zombies. Boyle and Garland’s new sequel to that first film, 28 Years Later, is both more Wyndhamlike and more overtly topical: For one thing, we ourselves are now survivors of a pandemic. And this new movie, emerging onto a geopolitical landscape that’s vastly different from 2002’s, riffs directly on all the dreams those who voted for Brexit hoped might come to pass—and all the ways Brexit created more problems than it solved.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s cut to the chase: 28 Years Later is mostly about zombies, which is, after all, the thing most of us are lining up for.

Boyle has said that he doesn’t like to use the word zombies to describe the angry, hungry beings of this movie and the earlier one; it only serves to dehumanize them, and we need to remember that they were once thinking, feeling humans. He prefers the term infected. That’s all well and good, but infecteds don’t sell tickets. And isn’t a zombie by any other name just as sweet? 28 Years Later—even though Cillian Murphy, the heart and soul of the first picture, doesn’t appear in it—delivers everything it promises, chiefly lots of mindlessly determined zombie-infecteds bearing down, and chomping down, on terrified non-infecteds. And it’s undoubtedly the true sequel to the duo’s earlier film, a poetic apocalyptic downer if ever there were one: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s reasonably effective standalone follow-up 28 Weeks Later, from 2007, now feels like just a brief digression in the franchise.

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But if 28 Years Later contains a little bit of everything that made the first film great, it also, somehow, adds up to less. It’s gorgeous to look at—cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle has returned to work some of his verdant magic. The editing is snappy and clever—the plot is interrupted here and there with what looks like ominous World War II-era newsreel footage, as well as clips from Laurence Olivier’s 1944 Henry V. This is an ambitious picture, filled with grand ideas. Parts of it are wondrously beautiful; some sections are so mawkishly morbid they might make you groan. But at least you won’t be bored.

28 Years Later opens with a terrifying snippet of child-endangerment: a group of trembling tykes huddle together in a house somewhere in the Scottish highlands, watching a scratchy Teletubbies VHS. The inevitable thing happens: the rage-virus-infected zombies invade the house, doing their thing and vomiting blood all over the place, but one child escapes and runs to a nearby church. You’ll have to wait till the movie’s end to find out what happens to him, but in between, Boyle and Garland have devised plenty of horrors to distract, disgust, and delight you.

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The story’s hero-in-training is a 12-year-old boy, Spike, played by a marvelously expressive young actor named Alfie Williams. He and his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and mother Isla (Jodie Comer) live on an island that, in a Great Britain that has been essentially destroyed by the virus, has managed to remain infection-free, thanks to the vigilance of these sturdy settlers. (A title card near the beginning of the movie tells us that Europe and the rest of the world have managed to fend off the virus, making this scourge a—Brexit metaphor alert!—Britain-centric problem.) These hardy souls have built a beautiful, self-sustaining, hippielike community: Sheep graze placidly in the fields. Sturdy men work with their hands, forging arrows with which to kill zombie interlopers. The women and girls flounce around charmingly as they go about fulfilling various womanly household tasks. Aye, but it’s exactly how the world should be, innit?

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This bucolic island is separated from the mainland only by a narrow causeway, guarded, on the island side, by a mighty, zombie-proof fortress. One of the jobs of the island menfolk is to cross to the mainland and kill zombies with the arrows they’ve forged with their very hands. Spike is a bit young for this, though father Jamie thinks he’s ready, and he too is eager to prove his manhood. But his mother would prefer to keep her son close: she’s bedridden and clearly not well. She drifts in and out of lucidity. Something is desperately wrong, and Jamie is losing patience with her; Spike, however, remains devoted

The less you know about Spike and Jamie’s zombie-hunting expedition and the revelations it triggers, the better. I will tell you only that there are fat, slow-moving zombies that look like overgrown babies and slurp worms from the ground, and fast-moving, harder-to-catch zombies with free-floating fury in their eyes. Boyle makes it clear that in some ways, the infected are much more sympathetic than the cloistered islanders: they’re driven only by impulse and need, not by some blinkered desire to return to life to the way it used to be—but then, you’ve been forewarned about all that. Ralph Fiennes turns up late in the movie, just when you might be wondering if you’re getting a little bored, as a tenderly wacky character who almost single-handedly shifts the movie’s tone. His performance is terrific. Another actor who shall not be named shows up a little later, with bad teeth and a fantastic tracksuit. That, too, is something to look forward to.

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Boyle and Garland are superb at building and releasing tension: just when you think you can’t bear any more bloody entrails or sinewy detached spinal cords, they lighten the mood. There are places where 28 Years Later is gorgeously somber, echoing the desolate lyricism of the first movie. And Mantle shoots the countryside, a place of both solace and menace, of both restorative greenery and end-of-life sunset skies, as if he were making a pagan offering to Jack Cardiff, the god of cinematic British beauty who shot most of the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

There’s much that’s terrifying and wonderful about 28 Years Later, but the ending is jarring and dumb, in a kick-ass heavy-metal way, and it breaks the mood. It’s as if Boyle had gotten cold feet about ending the movie on too solemn a note. But this ending, no matter how you feel about it, is really just a beginning. Boyle and Garland have two follow-up movies in the works. The next, already filmed, is directed by Nia DaCosta, of Candyman and The Marvels; Boyle will return for the third. We’ll be living in the world of 28 Years Later for a few more years to come. Come for the zombies; stay for the metaphors—no spoiler alert necessary for those.