28 Years Later

Don't try-try-try-try-to think of something different/Oh-my-god-keep-me from going lunatic about this movie!

We open on a group of children watching Teletubbies on TV as screams and mayhem unfolds in the background. Within minutes, these children are killed by the infected - bar one - and all the adults in the building are dead. The surviving child escapes to a church where his father, a priest, declares the attack to be a sign from the heavens before opening his arms to an oncoming hoard of infected, all thoughts of his child abandoned. Opening over, cue title card: 28 years later…

So opens 28 Years Later, which kicks things off as a fantastic zombie movie and lives up to that initial promise. But more importantly, the movie throws in a second promise for the remaining 110 or so minutes: The rest of the movie is not what you think it is.

We are then introduced to a peaceful village located on an island that’s connected to the mainland by a fortified tidal causeway. The survivors are isolated from the wider world and all that comes with it, but they’re self-sufficient. 12-year-old Spike (a brilliant Alfie Williams) is to accompany his dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, also great) to the mainland for his village’s coming-of-age ritual. Spike idolises his old man, but he’s nervous about the ritual because he’s younger than when teens typically partake in it. More worryingly for Spike, his mother Isla (Jodie Comer, absolutely brilliant) is sick with a mysterious illness and he doesn’t want to leave her.

As Spike and Jamie’s mainland journey unfolds across a pretty thrilling act one, we’re shown a by-the-numbers “older mentor teaches the young student how to survive in this post post-apocalyptic world” tale. It’s all well crafted and screenwriter Alex Garland’s immaculate script lays out the rules of the universe in crisp economic fashion… but it’s also nothing we haven’t seen before.

Up to this point, I wasn’t entirely sure what director Danny Boyle and Garland were going for with 28 Years Later. So far, Spike and Jamie have essentially been staging a much better version of The Last of Us. Was this going to be a typical “father saves son/daughter from zombies” tale? Thankfully not.

Things snap into sharp focus upon Spike and Jamie’s triumphant return to their village. As Jamie builds a tower of bluster and falsehoods in retelling his and Spike’s mainland adventure, Spike quickly realises that his father is not only full of shit but also doesn’t care about his sick mother, so he resolves to get her the help she needs, village rules be damned.

That’s an emotional gutpunch and story turn I didn’t expect, and it kicks off a high-stakes second act in which everything that was set up during’s Spike’s first mainland visit comes back into play.

Boyle and Garland some kind of yin-yang thing going where their collaborations always result in something more impactful than their solo stuff. If I had to take a stab at why this partnership works, I’d say it’s how Boyle’s capacity for empathy balances out Garland’s sheer cynicism about humanity. Make no mistake about it, 28 Years Later is bleak as fuck, but it never crosses into pure despair territory. Learning that your father whom you idolised is a cheating and lying scumbag is dark as hell and something that could easily spiral in Garland’s hands (looking at you, Civil War), but Boyle’s optimistic view of humanity always pulls things back from the brink.

At this point I got what they’re trying to do: 28 Years Later isn’t a zombie movie, it’s a bildungsroman that just happens to have zombies in it.

Now that’s interesting.

As Spike and Isla return to the zombie-infested mainland with the aim of finding Dr Kelson (a wonderful Ralph Fiennes), a reclusive and eccentric survivor who was once a GP and may be able to treat Isla, 28 Days Later changes lanes into a elegiac contemplation about the cycle of life and death. This culminates into one of the movie’s best scenes where Kelson teaches Spike a beautiful lesson about the concept of '“memento mori”, the Latin phrase meaning “remember you must die.” It sounds corny on paper, but Williams and Fiennes play each scene with such sincere humanity that it can’t help but be powerful.

It’s just astonishing how much emotional heft gets squeezed into these 50 or so minutes of 28 Years Later, to the point where I honestly think Boyle and Garland watched Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant, said to themselves “oh we can do that but way better”, and then actually went and did it. Hell, Boyle manages to do more visually with a bunch of iPhone 15 Pro Max devices than what Iñárritu did with twice the budget and fancy old school film.

This movie has an updated visual style that’s of a piece with this movie’s predecessor, 28 Days Later. Whereas 28 Days Later was shot on camcorders to give a bootstrapped documentary feel (which it basically was), 28 Years Later is primarily on an iPhone 15 Max, giving the movie a similar immediate homemade vibe. All the zombie attack sequences feel up close and claustrophobic while the hazy sweeping shots of the English and Scottish landscapes during Spike’s journey are utterly gorgeous.

At this point I need to stress one important thing: You can absolutely turn off your brain and be absolutely entertained because Boyle and Garland don’t skimp out on any of the hardcore zombie genre stuff. There are jump-scare zombie attacks, there’s gore, and there’s even a super zombie with a giant swinging dick who likes ripping people’s heads off, vertebrae and all.

Just as how Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan breathed new life into the vampire movie genre with the brilliant Sinners, 2025 sees Boyle and Garland working their magic once again to reinvigorate the flagging zombie movie genre. I certainly didn’t have “genre movies experiencing a big revival” on my 2025 movie bingo card.

With deeply fleshed-out themes and that’s-so-disgusting-but-I-can’t-take-my-eyes-off-the-screen spectacle, 28 Years Later packs the best of both worlds into a zombie movie and that’s really everything you can ask for.