The zombie has never been a particularly subtle metaphor, in its brainless, slobbering wave of mass consumerism and mass hysteria. It was a good fit for director Danny Boyle, who almost always takes the path of bravado and noise, because he knows it will eventually lead him to an image as striking as Cillian Murphy, in scrubs, walking around bewildered on a desolate Westminster Bridge.
That moment was the crown jewel of 28 Days Later (2002) and, now, 23 years later, we have 28 Years Later, in which Boyle and his co-writer Alex Garland circle back to the genre they helped reinvent. It’s fairly standard for your zombies, now, to run fast, attack intelligently, and to never actually be referred to as “zombies”: just look at The Last of Us. Boyle and Garland were key to cementing that new standard.
The question here, then, is what more there is to say. The original conceit was punchy but simple – that our quickness to anger is in itself a sign of society’s collapse, and that the difference between monster and man is not as defined as we’d like to think. 28 Years Later is a post-Brexit, Covid-conscious take on this world, with ideas about nationalism, isolationism, and weaponised culture added to the mix. But it’s punchy and simple once again.
To explain away the ending of 28 Weeks Later, the initial 2007 sequel that this new entry largely disregards, we’re told that the British “rage virus” did indeed reach France, but was promptly taken care of. (I like to imagine the French simply shrugged it away with a, “bof, pas de problème”.) The UK is all on its own. On the island of Lindisfarne, off the coast of Northumberland, a small community have returned to traditional practices: the men are sent off to pick off the infected like bunny rabbits as a right of passage, while the women stay at home to prepare the town hall for dancing and folk tunes (it’s actually Tom Jones’s “Delilah”, which they play like an ancient ballad, a clever detail).
Spike (Alfie Williams) is off on his first mainland trip with dad, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Talk of a reclusive survivor, Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), leads the kid to have a few reckless thoughts about what he might be able to do for his ill and bed-bound mother Isla (Jodie Comer). There are some new categories of infected to deal with, including “slow-lows”, who crawl around and suck worms, and “alphas”, the bigger and stronger leaders of the zombie packs.
We start with the image of blood splattered across a television set showing the Teletubbies and, later, fix on a shot of a burning English flag: there’s nothing ever too on-the-nose for Boyle. The staccato-cut footage of infected, the splashes of infrared, the audio of Rudyard Kipling’s 1903 poem “Boots” (as already heard in the film’s viral trailer), and the clips from Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944), all start to feel like too many variations on the same idea. Watching a zombie pull a Mortal Kombat finisher on somebody is cool once, a little repetitive the third time.
But even if 28 Years Later feels like being repeatedly bonked on the head by the metaphor hammer, Boyle’s still a largely compelling filmmaker, and the film separates itself from the first instalment by offering something distinctly more sentimental and mythic than before. Comer proves to be the key counterbalance, and there’s an openness and a vulnerability to her performance that helps turn 28 Years Later into, ultimately, the story of a mother’s love.
You assume Fiennes, too, rocking up with his shaved head, is about to pull a Colonel Kurtz, but he leads the character in some surprising directions. Even less predictable still is the way Jack O’Connell (still basking in Sinners’s success) turns up to tease the film’s already completed sequel, The Bone Temple. That one was shot by Nia DaCosta. Murphy is set to return. The real test will be to see if these movies can shift the genre into a new direction once more.
Dir: Danny Boyle. Starring: Alfie Williams, Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ralph Fiennes, Jack O'Connell, Edvin Ryding, Chi Lewis-Parry. Cert 15, 115 minutes
