Danny Boyle has at least gone for it in 28 Years Later, a not always exciting but relentlessly interesting capstone on the 28 trilogy. After 28 Days and Weeks Later, logically it should have been Months, but 18 years have passed since 2007 and 18 Years Later would have broken the poetics. So Years it is.
So many years, in fact, that none of the cast from the first or second film have made it this far, though Danny Boyle returns to the franchise (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo directed number two) bringing a lot of behind-the-camera talent from the 2002 original with him.
That includes writer Alex Garland, who reportedly borrowed the shape of the movie from Kes – you may find yourself stroking your chin over that one. We’re still in the UK, more exactly Britain, more exactly still, an island off the north east coast of England, safe from the maraudings of the “infected” (no one ever says zombie) and cut off from mainland Europe, where the undead problem has been brought under control.
A metaphor for the UK’s exit from the European Union, if you like. The references to the parochialism of the Brits do not stop there, with allusions to the poetry of Rudyard Kipling and Laurence Olivier’s film of Henry V rubbing shoulders with the Angel of the North, the Happy Eater and the Sycamore Gap (non-Brits can look them up in the usual places). Boyle, memorably, directed the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics, another demonstration of this child of Irish immigrants’ fascination with the particularity of the British.
Boyle and Garland come at their story in two halves, the masculine first half and the feminine second half – shouting and crying, to be unfair – with part one consisting of father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) taking son Spike (Alfie Williams) onto the mainland on a coming-of-age mission to be blooded (and bloodied) by contact with the infected, to be introduced to the easy ones, the Low and Slows, and the tricky ones, the Alphas, who can think and move at speed.
In part two Spike ventures off the island again, this time without dad. Instead he has in tow bewildered sick mother Isla (Jodie Comer), who needs medical help and might get it from a doctor reputed to be living wild on the mainland.
As said, shouting and crying, in part one Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s impressive Jamie raises his voice a lot more than you might think wise for a father teaching his son about the importance of stealth. Later, Comer wails in a variety of gothic ways in an attempt to ring the changes on an underwritten character. Ralph Fiennes turns up, as the rogue medic, painted head to toe in iodine (it’s a prophylactic, he says), and with a performance of almost Ben Gunn idiosyncrasy and eccentricity gives the film an injection of scampering energy.
Alfie Williams, as Spike, does pretty well. Neither too cute nor too knowing, his Spike is a normal kid – terrified of zombies, as you would be, in awe of his father, deeply bound to his mother. Williams conveys all this and also, nature taking a bit of a hand here, appears to grow up before our eyes.
There’s no escaping that this is an elegiac film, though the tone oscillates from the maudlin to the downright sentimental. Without Fiennes’s Dr Kelson to give it juice and a bit of shape, it would be a bag of bits. Kelson also adds a hint of optimism, a guarded Children of Men hope for the future, though Boyle and Garland are not in the business of giving us a happy ending, and have no interest in franchise extension.
This is it, we’re done, they seem to be saying, and as if to add a flourish of “and here’s a musical number to finish”, they introduce, in the film’s dying moments, a character called Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), a jingle-jangle stand-in for the dead TV presenter Jimmy Savile, the establishment hero knighted for “charitable services” who turned out to be the UK’s single most prolific sexual abuser.
It’s a strange way to exit. What started all those years ago with Cillian Murphy in a deserted Tourist London – the Britain the visitors see – has ended in a hall-of-mirrors version of the one that Brits actually live in. Plus the odd zombie.
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
