Director Danny Boyle re-teams with writer Alex Garland for 28 Years Later – a sci-fi horror sequel unafraid to shift tones. Our review:
We’ve seen post-apocalypse movies before, but 28 Years Later is perhaps the first post-Brexit apocalypse movie. This is director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland’s return to the gritty, 480p nightmare UK they first conjured up in 2002’s 28 Days Later – a brisk, intentionally lo-fi sci-fi horror that changed the pace of zombie movies for years afterwards.
Its hordes of Rage virus-infected ghouls may not have been zombies in the most technical sense – they aren’t corpses rising from graves – but the image of slavering, blood-spattered figures running, screaming, clawing was so powerful that the whole genre couldn’t help but move with them. We wouldn’t have had Zack Snyder’s Dawn Of The Dead remake without 28 Days Later, for one thing.
Much time has passed in the real world since that first film, and as its title implies, 28 Years Later takes place a generation after the Rage virus escaped from a lab and tore Britain apart. In a pointed opening title card that effectively walks back director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 2007 sequel 28 Weeks Later, we’re told that the pandemic was repelled from mainland Europe, leaving the UK sitting alone, a diseased island whose surviving population have been pushed back into the Dark Ages.
In other words, the UK has become even more insular and inward-looking than it already is, while the communities within it have closed themselves off – essentially becoming islands within islands. The only enclave we actually see is on Holy Island in the north of England: a village of hunter-gatherers, farmers and the like protected from the Rage horde by the sea. The only access in and out is a heavily-guarded causeway, only exposed to the fresh air at low tide. As one villager warns: once you leave the place, you’re on your own. “No rescues, no exceptions.”
In the first film, you may recall, the infected were seen to be starving to death; the implication there being that the virus was on the cusp of burning itself out. In the latest sequel, the infected have survived, seemingly by scavenging on whatever wildlife they can find. One variety of ghouls appears to subsist on munching down earthworms.
28 Years Later introduces Spike (newcomer Alfie Williams, who’s terrific) a quiet 12 year-old lad who lives in the shadow of his father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a seasoned hunter; he’s also troubled by the strange illness of his bed-ridden mother, the appropriately-named Isla (Jodie Comer). As well as regressing technologically, the UK of 28 Years Later also appears to have taken a backwards step socially; macho types like Jamie dominate the village with their tales of exploring the outside world and killing the infected with an expert shot from their bow and arrow.
As in 28 Days Later and other films written by Garland (most pointedly 2022’s Men), there’s a recurring theme here about the corrosive nature of masculinity, and how the fetishisation of killing and machismo are passed down through generations. Jamie isn’t a monstrous father figure, exactly, but his mile-wide flaws are deeply tethered to his idea of what a survivor in this harsh landscape should look like. Spike tries to match up to that ideal, as hinted at early in he and his father’s first hunting expedition together. “We can’t go back,” the boy reasons. “People will think we’re soft.”
It’s the horror most audiences are here for, however, and Boyle delivers it by the cartload: heads are torn off or struck through with arrows – the latter captured in a kind of low-budget, multi-angle bullet time. (Although shot with iPhones, there’s more definition and less grain here than there was in 2002.)
Meanwhile, Boyle’s off-beat sensibility is even more apparent here than it ever was. Conversations and dreams are intercut with red-tinted, night vision images of the infected gnashing their teeth. There are curious musical interludes and brief snippets of footage of what looks to this writer like 1952’s Ivanhoe. Jamie and Spike’s first journey to the mainland is cut to the haunting Kipling poem, Boots (read by Taylor Holmes) first heard on the trailer.
Boyle’s devastated society is also an unusual mix of the harsh and the almost nostalgically retro. The filmmaker establishes the style early with a shot of a blood-spattered CRT television showing the Teletubbies. Spike’s home town, with its outdoor showers, makeshift convenience store and community centre, looks strikingly 1980s – like something out of an old public safety commercial, or BBC sci-fi series, The Tripods. This is contrasted by the harshness of the violence and the depiction of the infected themselves: angry, ravenous, and profoundly nude.
It’s a brew that might be a little too offbeat for those expecting a more conventional horror flick, and there are times where the shift between tones is almost whiplash inducing. Uncompromising gore gives way to splashes of black humour; Studio Ghibli-esque moments of melancholy cut almost immediately back to screaming and gallons of claret. This writer’s still processing one late sequence, which is almost too bizarre (and spoilery) to describe here.
All the same, there’s a certain go-for-broke fearlessness about it all. Where some filmmakers (and studios) would be precious about what is planned as a major horror trilogy – Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is out next year – Boyle and Garland treat it more like a stolen car.
Bolstered by some solid performances from Taylor-Johnson, Comer, Williams and Ralph Fiennes (in a brief yet pivotal role), 28 Years Later lurches all over the place, but there’s still much to admire in its rabid unpredictability.
28 Years Later releases in UK cinemas on the 20th June.
