28 Years Later (2025)
Genre: Horror
Director: Danny Boyle
Writers: Alex Garland, Danny Boyle
Stars: Aaron Taylor‑Johnson, Alfie Williams, Angus Neill, Celi Crossland, Chi Lewis‑Parry, Christopher Fulford, Edvin Ryding, Emma Laird, Erin Kellyman, Geoffrey Newland, Ghazi Al Ruffai, Gordon Alexander, Jack O’Connell, Jodie Comer, Joe Blakemore, Kat Kitchener, Kim Allan, Maura Bird, Nathan Hall, Ralph Fiennes, Robert Rhodes, Rocco Haynes, Sam Locke, Sandy Batchelor
Twenty-eight years after the rage virus escaped from a medical research lab, survivors have found ways to coexist with the infected. A small community lives on an island connected to the mainland by a single fortified causeway. When a father and son leave the island on a mission into the mainland’s dark heart, they uncover the world’s secrets, wonders, and horrors…
* * *
During the suffocating months of lockdown, 28 Days Later felt like an ignored prophecy, reducing Trainspotting to little more than adolescent distraction. Now, 28 Years Later, set 23 years after the original, no longer comes off as dystopian sci-fi, but rather as a precise metaphor for a Britain increasingly isolated—not just politically, but ethically and humanly as well. Part coming-of-age tale, part hero’s journey, part survival film, part serial, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland have crafted an allegory of the present day, with a touch of sardonic irony suggesting that the horror of the first film has since become even more unsettling.
The survivors of the outbreak live on an island fortress in northern England. The mainland, connected only by a causeway that appears during low tide, harbors the danger—mainly the grotesquely slow-moving but massive “Slow-Lows,” slug-like creatures that feed on worms, and the much more fearsome Alphas, fast, resilient, tireless carriers of the rage virus. Boyle and Garland use the genre as a political lever, laying atop the foundational dread of the original pandemic story a commentary on recent transformations—chiefly, the aftermath of lockdowns and Brexit.
But 28 Years Later doesn’t aim for moderation or narrative clarity. It embraces excess, emotional surges, and a determination to unravel audience expectations through deliberately jarring shifts. What may appear as narrative fraying is actually creative freedom: a refusal to stick to genre convention and a clear setup for future developments. This is only the first chapter in a new trilogy, with the second film, The Bone Temple, already announced.
Two principles shape the film’s core: extremes and reversals. The underlying metaphor flips the usual script—instead of the infected being quarantined, it’s the so-called “good guys” who are isolated, cut off from the rest of the world (read: Europe) due to the perceived threat. It’s a jarring choice if viewed through a progressive, Euro-centric lens, but within Boyle and Garland’s more bitter, British-critical perspective, it makes unsettling sense. The film thrives on contradiction: familiar power dynamics are turned inside out, even amid the chaos of the setting.
The screenplay allows room for the unexpected and the surreal—a sensitive, mad doctor (played by Ralph Fiennes), a random Swedish soldier, a newborn that’s more symbol than character but clearly pivotal to future plotlines. Every scene is milked for maximum tension, no matter how implausible its setup may seem.
What unfolds rarely aligns with expectations. A supposed healing journey becomes an escort mission into hard truth; a trusted companion may meet a symbolic death. The film opens with an eerie scene involving the Teletubbies, used as a twisted childhood echo, while arrows fly in a medieval callback that evokes Laurence Olivier’s 1944 Henry V—a gratuitous reference, but one that fits the film’s unrestrained tone. Boyle’s style has evolved with technology: the grainy digital look of 2002 has become a fast-paced interplay between iPhone 15 Pro Max footage, drone shots, and the expansive 2.76:1 screen format. Boyle aims less for beauty than for urgency, yet many images are stunning—some even epic—despite being intentionally “dirtied” to feel raw and visceral.
Boyle’s visionary streak has remained intact even as his methods evolve. That’s one reason 28 Years Later is packed with revelations, not least of which is a biblical quote scrawled on a derelict house wall—a clue to both the film’s final sequence and the upcoming sequel. The submerged path to the mainland, and especially the doctor’s macabre shrine—a space somewhere between the Shoah Memorial, Naples’ Fontanelle Cemetery, and the Capuchin Crypt in Rome—are fitting backdrops for a film that’s as visually bracing as it is narratively tense. It pushes well beyond the limits of typical genre fare.
Giampiero Frasca
Cineforum, June 20, 2025
* * *
The first chapter of a likely new trilogy—and more crucially, the sequel to 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later—the almost-zombie blockbuster 28 Years Later reunites the British duo Danny Boyle and Alex Garland, throwing us into a post-apocalyptic scenario that references not just Romero’s undead, but also the grim foresight of The War Game and It Happened Here. The future is already here.
Men—men—men—men—men go mad with watchin’ ‘em
Seven—six—eleven—five—nine-an’-twenty mile to-day
Four—eleven—seventeen—thirty-two the day before —
(Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin’ up and down again!)
There’s no discharge in the war!
– Boots (1903), Rudyard Kipling
Civil War. Warfare. Men. And now 28 Years Later. Garland’s view of the present is clear-eyed and deeply troubling, and the staging matches that clarity with a grim, unflinching vision. Where films like Ex Machina, Annihilation, Never Let Me Go, and even Dredd peer into near-futures, Civil War and 28 Years Later confront present-day fears—fears that have already started to materialize. The rage that fuels 28 Years Later taps directly into the ethical and moral fractures of our time, much like Homegrown plays as a documentary prelude to Civil War.
Sure, in reviving the virus from 28 Days Later, Garland and Boyle must contend with zombie-adjacent tropes and blockbuster expectations, but their political framework is unambiguous—perhaps even tighter than the film’s genre elements.
They plunge us into a world not just haunted by Romero’s legacy but shaped by the chilling predictions of The War Game and It Happened Here: speculative fiction laced with horror, depicting a Britain left to fend for itself—a larger island, abandoned by Europe, Brexit and post-Covid woven into its social fabric. The military order, the patriarchal tone, the script’s symbolic elements (the priest, omnipresent crosses, an ossuary, and an inverted crucifix) force us to confront the value of life and death, the central role of emotional bonds—not just familial—and the importance of knowledge and awareness. Memento mori and memento amoris. The father figure’s unraveling, however, feels forced and formulaic, too neatly in line with trends.
More than the brutal and effective opening—memorable for its creepy use of Teletubbies—the film’s most striking stretch is an anxiety-laced montage set to Kipling’s Boots, in Taylor Holmes’s 1915 recording. The poem doesn’t just set the rhythm of the editing; it encapsulates the film’s uneasy mix of violence, militarism, blood, guts, and dread. It links past, present, and future in a swirl of flashbacks and horror-tinged forest scenes. This is the film’s high point—an aesthetic and narrative promise it ultimately can’t keep.
As 28 Years Later goes on, its razor-sharp madness dulls. The narrative drifts into familiar territory, begins to over-explain, to telegraph too much, and loses itself in cliché—especially once the military show up, or when young Erik the Swede appears, or when arrows suddenly work better than high-tech weapons.
Garland’s social and political elixir, partly sustained by Boyle’s direction, gets watered down in a franchise already mapped out. A second film—28 Years Later – Part 2: The Bone Temple, directed by Nia DaCosta—is in the works, and a third might follow. That looming sequel explains the circular but open ending, and the cliffhanger reminiscent of The Walking Dead. It also means Garland’s vision has to take a step back, yielding to box office demands and the weight of a saga that’s always trailed behind Romero without ever quite catching up. Not even this time.
Enrico Azzano
Quinlan, June 18, 2025
