In 28 Days Later, the walking dead don’t lumber; they sprint. But when the film hit theaters in 2002, that was just one of many surprises for audiences used to the slow, mindless zombies originated by George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead series. The director Danny Boyle’s postapocalyptic horror, written by his frequent collaborator Alex Garland, used low-resolution camcorders to capture the unsettling story of a man waking up to the end of society as he knew it. In the movie, humans have become victims of a “rage virus” epidemic, turning into vicious, bloodthirsty creatures within seconds—and survival means fleeing or fighting back. 28 Days Later soon inspired a wave of similar, undead-related movies, many of which copied its moves. Asked how he and Garland had revived the zombie flick so effectively, Boyle had a simple answer. “We took a genre,” he said in an interview in 2013, “and fucked with it.”
Boyle and Garland, returning after different filmmakers handled the sequel 28 Weeks Later, have only “fucked with” the genre further in the long-anticipated follow-up, 28 Years Later. Even fans of the franchise should brace themselves: This time around, the zombies—called “infected”—are more developed, the human characters odder, and the plot so dense that it’s both more high-minded and exceedingly ludicrous. The film is another attempt to reinvent the zombie-movie-genre wheel wholesale, and the result is both audacious and bound to be divisive. Before the movie began, I worried whether Boyle and Garland would be able to top themselves more than two decades after 28 Days Later; by the time it ended, I was laughing at just how fantastical and wild their efforts were.
Set somewhere off the coast of England, where the infected have been kept at bay by a heavily defended gate, 28 Years Later follows a 12-year-old boy named Spike (played by Alfie Williams). Spike has never known society before the rage virus left the United Kingdom quarantined from the rest of the world. He belongs to a tight-knit community of survivors, including his parents: His mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), is suffering from a mystery illness, and his father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), is eager for Spike to grow up and hunt the infected alongside him. The film opens with Jamie taking Spike to the mainland so that he can make his first kill—a rite of passage for the island’s boys. There, Spike learns of Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), a former doctor who has established a camp by himself in the middle of the woods. Although Jamie warns his son of Kelson’s strangeness—he builds towers of skulls, for one thing—Spike believes that Kelson can cure whatever’s ailing Isla.
To further describe what ensues would be to risk spoiling the delight. Yes, delight: It’s thrilling to watch a new entry in a horror franchise veer completely off the rails of its chosen genre. Spike starts his journey facing off against the kinds of infected not seen in the previous 28 movies; nearly three decades of mutations have yielded fresh, stomach-churning horrors. But his trek gets weirder, and more wondrous, as it goes along. In one scene, as Spike and Jamie flee the infected, the night sky appears to swallow them whole. Several characters Spike encounters seem to have wandered out of entirely different films. Much of 28 Years Later brings to mind details from other works—there’s a shady character akin to one from Station Eleven; a bloated variant of infected recalls the monsters in the anime Attack on Titan; and the circumstances of Spike’s island echo those of The Village—yet the movie feels singular. Like the bony sculptures Kelson has assembled, the film is abstract and unwieldy; at the same time, it’s impossible to look away from.
That’s in part because Boyle has once again applied a captivating digital aesthetic. Shot mostly on iPhones using a horseshoe-shaped rig, 28 Years Later evokes a fever dream crossed with an immersive video game: Tilted angles and extreme close-ups dominate scenes, as do jarring cuts and freeze-frames that lead to spectacular kill shots. Again and again, blood splatters onto the camera lens, producing gleefully gory images. It’s grimy, sometimes even ugly filmmaking, but it’s effectively disorienting.
What’s most striking about 28 Years Later, though, is how it manages to hold together its freewheeling plot and tonal shifts. The film grounds its story in Spike’s desire to save his mother at any cost—including, perhaps, his own sanity in a world hostile to innocence and tenderness. 28 Years Later punctuates the end of its first act, as it did in its excellent trailer, with a chilling 1915 recording of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Boots,” its verses about a soldier succumbing to lunacy soundtracking a montage of warfare. Spike’s journey becomes unnerving because his reality is collapsing before his eyes. By the time Kelson and Spike meet, Fiennes appearing to be caked in burnt-orange makeup (Kelson has covered himself in iodine), I’d begun to wonder if I’d gone mad myself.
I’m not sure if every one of the disparate beats and twists work in tandem; some images, such as that of the English flag in flames, are annoyingly on the nose. Isla is underwritten, even if Comer gives the character her all; lines such as “the magic of the placenta” are laughable in their earnestness. But I haven’t seen any comparable franchise go through a transformation such as this one. Boyle and Garland have taken a bold swing at material they created while maintaining the core appeal of the series. 28 Years Later grasps that its two predecessors have endured not only because of the intrigue conjured by fast-moving zombies and a found-footage look but also because they probe how isolation reshapes the human mind. Here, Spike is an avatar for the arrested development of an entire culture. He has no idea what the mainland looks like, what modern life entails, and what it feels like to be consumed by fear of something other than the infected—including the possibility that he can’t stop his mother’s suffering.
The opening shot of 28 Years Later shows a group of humanoid creatures wandering a landscape; above it, instead of a sun, looms a smiling baby. It’s a scene from Teletubbies, perhaps the most unnerving children’s television show there ever was, and it’s the perfect amuse-bouche for what the rest of the film brings. Although 28 Years Later doesn’t star any toddlerlike aliens with touch-screen tummies, the movie is just as baffling, disturbing, and profoundly absorbing in its idiosyncracy. It ends on a cliffhanger, but I barely cared; the already filmed sequel set to be released in January will likely resolve it, and the final scene makes clear what Boyle and Garland have done: With 28 Days Later, they messed with a genre. With 28 Years Later, they’re messing with us.
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