Review: 28 YEARS LATER

 by Rob DiCristino

“Memento mori.”

Minor spoilers ahead.

“I was wrong when I said staying alive is as good as it gets,” a character confesses in Danny Boyle’s seminal undead thriller, 28 Days Later. And though the line might refer to the love and companionship that make that fight for survival worthwhile, it doubles as a prescient statement about the horror subgenre that Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland were about to revitalize after years in the DTV wilderness. 28 Days Later would spawn dozens of imitators as the new millennium began — Boyle’s combination of consumer-grade digital video and frenetic editing became the de rigueur aesthetic for action movies in the waning days of Blockbuster — but it was the film’s merciless critique of human savagery that would ultimately make it an instant classic. Years before The Walking Dead and The Last of Us reminded mainstream audiences of George Romero’s dictum — the real monsters, of course, are us — 28 Days Later argued that a great survival story is about more than just staying alive; it’s about what we do with that life once the zombie hordes have changed it forever.

So what do we do with those new lives, and how do we reckon with the fact that death is still coming for us in the end? It’s questions like these that drive 28 Years Later, Boyle and Garland’s first re-teaming since 2007’s Sunshine. Twenty-eight years after the Rage Virus left Great Britain quarantined from the rest of the world — 28 Weeks Later, with which the pair had little involvement, is quickly retconned in the opening titles — we’re introduced to a small island just off the coast of Northern England, where a handful of foragers have persisted without modern conveniences. Connected to the mainland by a short causeway but committed to preserving their own sovereignty at all costs, the community has forfeited any hope of reconnection with a world that has moved on without them. For younglings like Spike (a poised Alfie Williams, in his acting debut), life is a quiet arrangement of domestic duties and modest celebrations, like the one held in his honor when he and his father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Jamie) return from the mainland with news of Spike’s first kill.

Spike’s no warrior, though, and Jamie’s exaggerated boasting about his son’s prowess with a bow and arrow leaves the younger man questioning the virtue of all these rituals. The only thing Spike is sure about is his love for his mother (Jodie Comer as Isla), whose mysterious physical deterioration has left her bedridden and belligerent. Jamie may have given up hope, but stray rumors about a reclusive mainland doctor are enough to send Spike back across the causeway in search of a cure. With his mother in tow, Spike fends off new and evolved models of undead — bloated “slow-lows” and distractingly-well-endowed Alphas, who sport sophisticated stalking tactics and immense strength — alongside a Swedish quarantine officer (Edvin Ryding as Erik) whose shipwrecking is akin to banishment from the rest of the world. They soon find their way to Dr. Ian Kelson (a delicate and delightful Ralph Fiennes), at which point Boyle and Garland trade the survival horror of the first hour for a moving rumination on the essential role that death has to play in the circle of life.

And with the exception of a bizarre final coda that sets up Nia DaCosta’s upcoming The Bone Temple — hint: an ostentatiously-dressed Jack O’Connell appears as the backflipping “Sir Jimmy Crystal” — it’s this last movement that lingered with me the most on the drive home from the theater. For much of its running time, 28 Years Later is a rote and underwhelming post-apocalypse story with little to contribute in the way of horror genre innovation. We get new zombie rules, a bit of day-to-day life, and some details about how the franchise’s universe has progressed since ‘02. Reels of British war footage play over Rudyard Kipling’s “Boots,” cementing an unsubtle nationalism allegory. Boyle regular Anthony Dod Mantle replicates his scrappy 28 Days Later cinematography with a souped-up iPhone — the 2025 equivalent of DV — and it’s all par for the lega-sequel course. Boyle seems torn between a frightening follow-up to what may be his signature film and a more mature story that reflects his advanced age and thematic interests. It’s all the very definition of a mixed bag.

But there is something truly beautiful about Spike scaling a tower of bones to find the proper place for a loved one’s remains. There is something deeply profound about Dr. Kelson’s careful process of preservation, a solemn ceremony that, though rooted in science, borders on the very religiosity that so many in the 28 Days Later universe have long-since abandoned. There is something incredibly cathartic about Spike discovering genuine tenderness in a society that has taught him nothing but indifference and pain. More than most other mainstream films in recent memory, 28 Years Later’s final act recontextualizes everything that came before it to such an extent that it almost becomes worth the grating and uninspired effort to get there. My hope is that repeated viewings of 28 Years Later — especially after DaCosta’s “second half” of the story is released early next year — will firm up those wobblier bits and give us better insight into why — aside from what was surely a handsome paycheck from Sony — Boyle and Garland saw fit to return to this franchise.

28 Years Later hits U.S. theaters on Friday, June 20th.