28 Years Later (2025) ***½
In the opening months of 1918, not long before a combination of technological and geopolitical breakthroughs put an end to the three-year stalemate of the First World War’s western front, a novel strain of influenza established itself in the trenches, and underwent a terrible transformation. Most flu strains are truly dangerous only to small children, the elderly, and the already infirm, but this one mutated so as to kill strong men in the prime of life as easily as it did babies, old geezers, and invalids. Worse yet, because the soldiers who got most seriously ill with it were rotated back for treatment in hospitals safely behind the lines, while milder cases were left to tough it out at the front, it was precisely the deadliest and most transmissible variant of the new virus that was introduced to civilian populations. With public health infrastructure already strained to the breaking point by the war, the result was all but inevitable. In four waves of pandemic infection over the course of three years, what came to be known erroneously as the Spanish Flu* killed millions across the globe. It was the worst, most lethal pestilence in centuries, even if there’s still little consensus on just how many people it killed; plausible cases can be made for almost any figure from 20 to 100 million. The startling thing, though, is that the Spanish Flu never really went away. Every H1N1 flu to emerge since 1920 has been descended from it, and while a few of those were pretty bad news, even the nastiest have been duckies and bunnies in comparison to their fearsome progenitor. That’s more or less the normal afterlife for formerly pandemic viruses, as a matter of fact. You see, it’s ultimately self-defeating for a pathogen to kill its host. Indeed, the optimal strategy is to evolve toward a form that causes the host no worse than minor inconvenience, so that it keeps going about its business essentially as usual, passing the infection along to every susceptible organism in the environment. We saw much the same process at work over the past half-decade with COVID-19, as each successive variant became more virulent than the last, but also more dependably survivable.
What all that has to do with 28 Years Later is that this movie does something which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. Building on the groundwork already laid by 28 Days Later… and 28 Weeks Later, this third film in the series contemplates the long-range results of a zombie plague not only in terms of how human society would evolve to cope with it, but also from an epidemiological standpoint. This time around, writer Alex Garland and director Danny Boyle ask how the rage virus itself might change, giving rise to strains capable of reaching strange new equilibria with humanity.
Like the previous sequel, 28 Years Later begins near the height of the initial outbreak. Somewhere in the Scottish Highlands, a boy named Jimmy (Starve Acre’s Rocco Haynes) who belongs to the rather large family of a rural vicar (Sandy Batchelor) has been herded into the TV room along with all of his sisters and cousins to watch “Teletubbies” while their elders attend to pressing business that they don’t want the kids to know about. It’s the rage virus, of course. Father is at the church going unhelpfully mad, and the rest of the grownups are already at their wits’ end when the first of the infected arrive. The house is quickly overrun, and Jimmy alone escapes with his life. Fleeing to the church, he finds his dad preparing to welcome death at the zombies’ hands as some manner of redemptive blessing. But of course the infected aren’t really interested in killing; their object is to spread the virus that has destroyed their minds, so what the vicar has coming is really more along the lines of a conversion. Churches have even more funny little nooks and crannies than Highland farmhouses, though, and Jimmy is able to make himself inaccessible while the besieging hordes turn his father into a monster. We’ll be seeing this kid again, but not until the very last scene of the film (by which point he’ll have aged into Jack O’Farrell, from 300: Rise of an Empire and Sinners).
28 years later, the outside world has pretty much given up on the British Isles. An attempt to recolonize London some six months after the first wave of infection ended in disaster (as we saw in 28 Weeks Later), and now one of the most important jobs for the navies of the other European powers is to patrol the seaward approaches to the Isles, making certain that nobody either leaves or sets foot on English, Scottish, Welsh, or Irish soil. Nevertheless, on Holy Island, off the coast of Northumberland, an outsider could be forgiven for concluding that the quarantine hasn’t changed things all that much. The people there had always been inward-looking, traditionalist, and mostly self-sufficient, so that the forced return to a pre-industrial economy was less disruptive there than it was practically anywhere on the British mainland. Also, Holy Island is compact enough and sufficiently remote from major population centers that its people could deal with the infected from a position of strength. Zombies don’t swim, and there’s way onto the island on foot except via a narrow causeway that can be traversed only at low tide. It was no trouble to fortify the beach around the island end of the causeway, and as King Leonidas reminds us, it doesn’t take many men to defend a narrow chokepoint against even a massive and determined assault. The infected aren’t much bigger on determination than they are on water sports.
The people of Holy Island have initiated at least one completely new tradition, however, since the sequestering of Britain. Sometime during the past 28 years, it became an important rite of passage for fathers to take their sons onto the mainland for a hunting and scavenging expedition. The scavenging, of course, is aimed at reclaiming any useful junk from before the outbreak that the islanders can’t readily duplicate for themselves (although, practically speaking, there isn’t much of that left after all this time). But the hunting has less to do with stocking the larders back home than it does with teaching boys how to fight, because neither fathers nor sons are permitted to return until the latter have killed at least one of the infected. Normally these ventures are undertaken when a lad is fifteen. Individual parents have leeway to determine when their sons are mature enough to handle the challenge, however, since each boy grows at his own pace, and the stakes are life and death.
One Holy Islander by the name of Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, of Nosferatu and The Magic Door) is of the opinion that his boy, Spike (Alfie Williams), has what it takes already, even though he’s just twelve years old. Jamie’s reasoning is never directly addressed, but it looks to me like he’s getting Spike such an early start on manhood as a coping mechanism. His wife, Isla (Jodie Comer, from Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and The Bikeriders)— it’s pronounced “Eye-la”— has been ill for quite some time with something that defies what little medical expertise remains on the island. She has little strength, stamina, or appetite, and she’s prone to unpredictable spells of delirium and dementia. Neither of them will say so out loud, but Jamie and Spike both fear that she hasn’t much longer to live. It’s my interpretation that Jamie is hoping to toughen Spike up for life without his mom while simultaneously displacing his own anxieties onto an ordeal whose outcome it’s within his power to affect.
For Spike, Northumberland might as well be a fairy kingdom. Britain’s native non-human fauna are evidently immune to the rage virus, and nature has almost fully reclaimed the Northlands. There are herds of deer the likes of which have not been seen since before the Romans tried their hands at conquering Britannia, roaming second-growth forests of shocking extent. But for a kid who’s lived his whole life in a place where you can always see, hear, or at least smell the sea, the most magical thing about the mainland is its seeming endlessness. A person could walk for days without passing the same bit of scenery twice! We in the audience have some surprises in store or us, too, though, because the infected are no longer the insensate engines of violence that we remember. They’re still plenty dangerous, but even the most aggressive of them now respond to other drives than to spread the virus. The infected that Jamie and Spike encounter in Northumberland eat, drink, and sleep, which explains why they’re still alive so long after the second outbreak. What’s more, they mate, accounting for the youth and vigor of the typical zombie. And it seems that there are now three strains of the rage virus endemic to the British mainland. One produces the more sustainable version of the old symptoms that I’ve just finished describing. A second strain produces grossly fat zombies that crawl around on their bellies, grubbing for worms and insects to eat— although they’ll still happily vomit a gout of virulent blood into the face of any uninfected person they encounter if given the chance. The third and rarest strain, which seems as if it might affect only men, transforms the host into a superhumanly strong and tough giant with enough residual intelligence to coordinate the actions of his lesser fellows. Picture an NBA center with the mind of a chimpanzee and the power and endurance of a wild boar, and you’ll have the general idea.
Spike’s first visit to the mainland is a bigger adventure than either he or his father bargained for. Although the boy fulfills his mission quickly enough by bagging one of the worm-eaters, his nerves fail when they come under attack by a mob of the more formidable and familiar frenzied zombies. Worse yet, that pack is under the command of an Alpha (Jamie’s term for the gargantuan third type of infected), which traps them overnight in the loft of a decaying manor house. Indeed, that Alpha will ultimately chase them across the causeway to the very gates of Holy Island before one of the night watchmen brings it down with a harpoon gun. But Spike’s encounters with the infected don’t disturb him nearly as much as the traces he sees of Northumberland’s still-human inhabitants. What to make of the aftermath of a grisly execution in which a man was left bound and strung up by his ankles in the ruins of a house for the zombies to find, the name “Jimmy” enigmatically carved into his chest? And why, during their vigil in the loft, was Spike’s father so frightened of a bonfire far off to the southwest, even though he claimed never to have been to the spot?
The answer to the latter question starts coming into view on the night of Spike and Jamie’s return, after the boy slips out early from the fete thrown in his honor by the village. There’s an old man named Sam (Christopher Fulford) who sometimes helps look after Isla when Jamie and Spike can’t do so themselves, and he’s pretty sure he knows what’s what when the boy mentions the mysterious fire. Sam says it sounds like the doing of a man called Kelston (who’ll be played by Ralph Fiennes, from Wrath of the Titans and Strange Days, when we see him up close later on). 30 years ago, before the rage virus, Kelston was Sam’s doctor, but nowadays he’s odd. The old man won’t elaborate any further, but in the morning, Jamie reluctantly tells Spike the story of how he and a foraging party once stumbled upon Kelston arranging hundreds of corpses in disturbingly precise grids around that bonfire of his, which he never allows to go out. Obviously the work of a madman— and the survivors of the rage plague have enough trouble remaining survivors as it is without consorting with the insane. None of that strikes Spike as being nearly as important, though, as the fact that there’s a fucking doctor in Northumberland. A doctor who could figure out what the hell is wrong with his mother. A doctor who could cure her. And if all the adults on Holy Island are too afraid of that doctor to enlist his aid, then Spike will just have to sneak Isla over to the mainland himself and take her to him.
I was extremely skeptical when I first heard that 28 Days Later… was joining the legacy sequel club. The trailer looked promising, though, and the longer I thought about it, the more I warmed up to the idea. After all, the previous two films had each done an almost Romero-worthy job of sublimating some contemporary real-world anxiety above and beyond the obvious inherent baggage of the zombie subgenre in its modern form, and is there any other recent franchise more naturally suited to a post-Brexit, post-covid environment? Although 28 Years Later’s ad campaign was enigmatic, it seemed to promise the story of a culture turning strange and twisted in paranoid isolation, so meditations on covid and Brexit certainly looked like the direction in which Danny Boyle and Alex Garland would be headed. It therefore threw me for a loop when this movie turned out to be, at its core, an achingly sad coming-of-age tale about facing up to the inevitability of death. None of the trailer’s compelling imagery meant what I thought it was going to— and some of it meant the exact opposite! Also, the movie didn’t seem, on first impression, to have a climax as such, and the coda left me completely baffled, as if it had originally been intended for some other film altogether. But 28 Years Later nevertheless wormed its way into my mind so deeply that I couldn’t stop thinking about it during the ensuing week, in ways that told me I had missed something important. Meanwhile, I learned that the final scene really did have a purpose separate from that of the preceding hour and three quarters, for it was included to set up still another sequel, shot in tandem with this one, but not scheduled for completion and release until next year. I consequently went back to the theater the following weekend, and that time it all snapped into place. (Well, most of it did. I’m still not totally sold on that coda.)
The missing piece of the puzzle was this: a boy striving against nigh-impossible odds to save his ailing mother, only to learn that some things can’t be cured, fixed, or undone, really is the perfect microcosm for our current historical epoch. The world we inherited from the 20th century is terminally ill, but that’s too vast a concept for anyone to understand in its totality, and too terrifying to look at head on. Watching the elders who brought us up sicken and die, though? That’s something anyone can grasp, and something that just about all of us have to face sooner or later. To watch Spike facing it in a setting where the world of the 20th century is already irrevocably gone builds a bridge from one concept to the other, and reveals the parallels between them. Among other things, it reframes the wild extravagances of cultural and political self-harm committed across the developed world over the past decade and a half or so as the maladaptive early stages of grief recapitulated on a societal scale— which I honestly think might be a fruitful way of approaching them.
The characterization of Dr. Kelston, once we get to know him, goes a long way toward making the trick work. The villagers on Holy Island are afraid of him because they don’t understand what he’s up to, and because what he’s up to legitimately looks scary as fuck if you don’t understand it. In that respect, the doctor’s activities are a lot like modern medicine 80 years past the crossing of most people’s Clark’s Law threshold, when the relevant technologies became indistinguishable not merely from magic, but from witchcraft as well. His reputation on the island can be read as a metaphor for the rising popularity of conspiratorial health pseudoscience of all types, from homeopathy to antivaxing to hysteria over the supposedly feminizing effects of seed oils. Again, though, the guy’s building a 40-foot obelisk of human skulls, like something the Leatherface family would make if they got a grant from the Works Progress Administration, so it doesn’t take a scrotum-toasting canolaphobe to see where Jamie and his neighbors are coming from. But in fact there’s both beauty and wisdom in Kelston’s macabre monument, along with a strong dash of straight-up doctorly practicality. It’s wild, too, seeing Ralph Fiennes, whom I know mostly for playing callow schmucks in the 90’s, cast so convincingly as an old man brimming with sorrowful compassion, who may indeed be slightly cracked, but who got that way by loving that which was doomed and damned. Few things encapsulate what a peculiar, unexpected zombie movie 28 Years Later is like the depth of feeling that Fiennes conveys when Spike presents him with the opportunity— which he never thought he’d receive— to explain the meaning of what’s become his life’s work.
And that brings me at last to the greatest revelation I received from my second go-round with 28 Years Later. The first time, I let the imagery of the trailer prime me to expect a conclusion in keeping with those of the first two installments. Maybe there’d be a florid set-piece about escaping the domain of some Little Englander Immortan Joe. Or maybe I’d get something more zombie-centric, like a tweedier, mistier version of the final siege in Land of the Dead. There was nothing at all like that, though— just a strangely inconclusive scene in which the Alpha whom Kelston has dubbed Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) briefly corners Spike and the doctor in one of the latter’s well-concealed boltholes. What’s more, the placement of that scene makes it feel like not so much a climax as the start of a gradual winding down of the action from a high point that never came. But what I see now is that I was thinking about the final act all wrong. I was looking for a crescendo of violence when I should have been looking at the somber diminuendo of Isla’s funeral. It isn’t that 28 Years Later lacks a climax, but rather that its climax is more appropriate to a drama than to a horror, action, or sci-fi movie. When this film reaches its highest emotional pitch, it isn’t trying to make your heart race with fear or excitement; it’s trying to make you sob like a little kid, reminding you of every loved one you’ve ever lost, or might lose in the future. And while I won’t say it made me sob on second viewing… well, after nineteen years, it doesn’t rise to the top of my mind very often anymore, but if you’re listening, Grandma, I miss you.
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