The true horror of Danny Boyle’s original zombie masterpiece was its subtext. The third film is missing a message
It has been 28 long years since the events of Danny Boyle’s 2002 zombie masterpiece 28 Days Later, in which a “rage virus”, accidentally released from an animal testing facility, tore through the UK and gutted the entire country. Now, in Boyle’s 28 Years Later – which reunites the director with original writer Alex Garland – civilisation has crumbled.
Armed ships patrol the coast, enforcing a permanent quarantine. A few pockets of survivors remain, barricaded against the ravenous hordes of the infected. The zombies are mostly naked by now, their jerky, spasmodic movements and knotted, gnarled limbs rendered all the more horrifying by the crusted layers of filth and the dried blood of their victims on their clammy, undead skin. The threat that they pose is undiminished, however.
Add to this the urgent, agile camerawork – the movie was partially shot by the first film’s cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle, on an iPhone 15 Pro Max – a score so intense it flays your nerves raw, and a semi-demented, orange-daubed Ralph Fiennes and you have pretty much everything you may hope for in the long-awaited third instalment of the horror series.
Everything, that is, except an ending. For a conclusion to this chapter, we’ll have to wait until January 2026 and the release of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. In the meantime, we are left with a curiously unsatisfactory final tonal shift that feels at odds with Boyle’s taut, sinewy action direction and propulsive, if occasionally scattershot, storytelling. It’s hard not to feel just a little cheated, then, particularly given the director’s bold creative decisions and how viscerally effective much of the film is.
The first films implied uniformed men with guns were just as fearsome as flesh-chewing monsters
The picture starts with a brief prelude, a refresher glimpse of the events during the initial outbreak of the virus. Somewhere in the Scottish Highlands a small community has barricaded its terrified children in a room in front of the TV (the theme tune from the Teletubbies is used to brilliant effect; who could have predicted the soundtrack to the end of the world would be so jaunty?).
As the zombies invade the room, the only person to escape is a lone child, a character who is absent for most of this feature but who, you suspect, will play a significant role in the next one.
The main story begins on an unprepossessing scab of land connected to the mainland by a tidal causeway. The survival of the island’s tiny population is dependent on fortifications, an armoury of whittled weaponry and a set of hard-and-fast rules: “No rescues, no exceptions,” cautions one of the village elders. Anyone who leaves the island fortress does so at their own risk.
This warning looms large in the mind of Spike (Alfie Williams), who, along with his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), is about to make his first armed foray on to the mainland. It’s an honour usually reserved for children aged 14 and over. Spike is younger, but his father assures him that he’s ready. His gravely ill mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), in one of her brief and increasingly rare lucid spells, thinks otherwise.
On the wild, lushly forested mainland, every slaughtered zombie and every crow-pecked corpse is a teachable moment. There is, instructs Jamie, a taxonomy of zombie types, with the fire-eyed, furious and fleet-footed variety of the earlier films backed up by a slower iteration – a bloated, slime-oozing and repulsive creature that crawls on the ground, maggot-like. Both can be dispatched relatively simply, given steady nerves and a true aim. But the “Alphas” are a different matter: an immense zombie ubermensch, they can take multiple arrow hit s or even bullets and still keep barrelling forwards.
The zombie jeopardy sequences are breathlessly tense, but the film’s most thrilling moment is a montage of Spike and Jamie’s journey, spliced together with archival combat footage and vintage film clips and cut to the rhythm of a 1915 recording of Rudyard Kipling’s poem Boots. The recitation, by the actor Taylor Holmes, was also used in the film’s superb trailer earlier this year – a fact that lessens some but not all of the chilling impact of Holmes’s tortured delivery.
Not everything works. What’s missing – along with an ending – is the allegorical political subtext that turns a good zombie flick into a great one. The first two films in the series suggested that uniformed men with guns are ultimately just as fearsome as any plague of flesh-chewing zombies; we’ll have to wait for the next film (directed by Candyman’s Nia DaCosta) to learn what message, if any, is being served up alongside this latest helping of gore and mayhem.
The final scene gives a hint: the virus turned most of the population into zombies. But perhaps something equally terrifying has been unleashed in some survivors.
28 Years Later (115 mins, 15) Directed by Danny Boyle; starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes
Photograph by Miya Mizuno/Sony Pictures
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