The undead refuse to rest. In 28 Years Later, they’ve lost none of the fleet ferocity they first displayed in 2003’s harrowing 28 Days Later and its first-rate 2007 follow-up 28 Weeks Later.
Resurrecting their influential zombie franchise and its hordes of Rage-infected monsters, director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland leap forward in narrative time to detail life on a Scottish Highlands island where a group of survivors have formed a walled-in community free from the planet’s viral plague.
A tale about learning to live with death—and recognizing that beginnings often spring from endings—it’s a gripping, unnerving, and altogether thrilling saga that both continues its predecessors’ illustrious legacy and initiates what’s shaping up to be a promising new horror trilogy.
28 Days Later broke ground for being shot on low-resolution DV cameras, and 28 Years Later, which hits theaters June 20, follows innovative suit by filming with lens- and gadget-outfitted iPhone 15 Pro Maxes that provide the material with cinematographic dexterity and a grim, muted visual sheen.
Boyle indulges in just the right amount of stylistic flourishes, whether capturing kill shots in multiple, swift freeze frames, crafting a panorama of miniscule figures set against the Northern Lights-illuminated sky, or crosscutting between the action proper and archival film clips (of boys marching, men logging, and archers firing) which suggests the constant, repetitive links between yesterday and today.
Simultaneously, the director puts a premium on dynamic intimacy, focusing on the up-and-down plight of Spike (Alfie Williams), a 12-year-old who’s awakened one morning by his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) for a day that’s destined to be transformative.
Jamie and Spike live in a secluded enclave that’s connected to the mainland via a causeway that’s only accessible during low tides, and the duo traverse this path for Spike’s first visit to the forests and meadows where the infected roam. With his dad by his side, Spike is expected to kill his first zombie.
This rite of passage is at once exciting and scary for the tween, who like his elder is armed with a bow and arrows that are lethal if they strike their intended targets’ heads or hearts. Jamie is a gruff but patient mentor, and committed to this practice, no matter that his wife Isla (Jodie Comer) dislikes the boy being put in danger—an objection that would carry more weight if she weren’t suffering from a mysterious malady that keeps her confused, weak, and bedridden.
28 Years Later establishes this corner of the world with lived-in details and well-drawn personalities, and it wastes no time getting to its gruesome business, with Jamie and Spike encountering a collection of obese zombies crawling on the woodlands ground, eating whatever stringy worms they locate in the soil.
These creatures prove easy prey for Spike, but things take a turn for the perilous when father and son stumble upon an Alpha—a larger, stronger, smarter zombie that commands minions—and must seek shelter in an abandoned house’s rickety loft. In that shelter, Spike notices a distant fire that Jamie suspiciously refuses to identify or discuss. Before the kid can press his pop further, calamity strikes, instigating a race back home that concludes with a more up-close-and-personal showdown with the fearsome Alpha.
Spike is welcomed back like a hero, in no small part thanks to his dad’s exaggerated boasts. Yet revelations about Jamie soon strain the pair’s relationship and compel the kid to take his mom on a clandestine trek across the mainland to find a doctor who might cure her enigmatic ailment.
While Jamie claims that no physicians remain in this futuristic hellscape, Spike learns that the aforementioned fire might be the handiwork of Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), whose pastimes are rumored to be more than a tad macabre.
Along their journey, they cross paths with Erik (Edvin Ryding), a twentysomething Swedish peacekeeper who’s the sole remaining member of his team, many of whom have just been taken down by the Alpha, whose calling card is ripping off the heads and spinal cords of his victims. Through Erik, Boyle and Garland offer tidbits about the bigger global picture and, with it, the reason for Spike’s community’s back-to-basics isolation.
Boyle choreographs a handful of effective jolts as well as a couple of pulse-pounding pursuits involving the Alpha, a nude goliath who can’t be felled by puny arrows and who’s, ahem, enormous in every way. Garland’s script imagines the infected as a subspecies that’s undergone (and continues to undergo) a process of evolution.
Nothing remains static in this chaotic reality, including assumptions about the nature of loved ones and the zombies, who appear to have retained at least some of their primal instincts. At the center of this maelstrom is Spike, and Williams’ expressiveness makes him a worthy protagonist, caught between adolescence and maturity, driven by a desire to do right by his mother, and imbued with measures of courage and resolve that he isn’t initially aware he possesses.
Alongside a rugged Taylor-Johnson and sympathetically damaged Comer, Williams is a compelling lead, and his quest is a coming-of-age odyssey in which he learns the depths of his convictions, the extent of his loyalties, and the necessity of accepting, and facing, the ever-present specter of death.
This is most true during Spike and Isla’s time in the company of Kelson, who’s skilled with a blow gun and whose decades-long labor has been inspired by the Latin phrase memento mori. Bald and covered head-to-toe in streaky burnt-orange iodine, Fiennes cuts a striking figure as the wayward doctor, and his chapter underscores the proceedings’ belief that growing up inevitably requires grappling with one’s mortality.
28 Years Later ultimately mutates into a surprisingly moving portrait of coming to terms with impermanence and the symbiotic relationship between creation and destruction, even as it delivers breakneck sequences on par with its ancestors’ finest moments. More intriguing still, it satisfyingly wraps up its story while laying the groundwork for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, a fourth series installment (from Garland, Boyle, and director Nia DaCosta) that’s slated for theatrical release in January 2026.
Set to involve Jack O’Connell’s bleach-blonde tracksuit-wearing Jimmy—whose backstory is this film’s prologue, and who leads a group of similarly dressed acolytes—it’s a sequel that, thanks to this exceptional horror affair, now sits near the top of next year’s must-see list.
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