Review: 28 Years Later

Director:  Danny Boyle

Stars:  Alfie Williams, Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes

For the last decade or so, Danny Boyle – a once relentlessly forward-moving filmmaker – has been slowly cannibalising the past. From the Beatlemaniac Yesterday to his belated (and godawful) Trainspotting follow-up, there’s been a pronounced reflective undertow. In principal, 28 Years Later only furthers this sense of a director cleaving to his own past glories in the absence of new successes. It has been a good while since Boyle wowed on the big screen.

The early warning signs are discouraging. In an effort to aesthetically match the style of the 2002 film that started these patchwork tales of the Rage Virus, 28 Years Later comes at you hard, fast and ragged. Low-fi DV and archaic-seeming cellphone cams capture frantically edited action in headache-encouraging flashes. Young Fathers’ score gamely apes this sense of queasy dissonance. Projected onto a cinema screen, it has the look and feel of a spuriously sourced torrent. Something your firewall would rather you didn’t seed. Indeed, Boyle may have a claim for Ugliest Movie of the Year in the bag, and you sense he’d collect it with pride.

But, a little like Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, these early hyperactive affectations settle down as things progress, and this opening chapter of a new trilogy (it’s important to remember that) starts coming into its own. It isn’t graceful – and its rather nakedly in thrall of the zombie video game culture that exploded in this series’ own wake – but 28 Years Later is ambitious, well-structured and even… affecting.

Boyle’s sense of reflection (and in this case regret) has been cast outwards. This is a defiantly and hyper-specifically British film. It’s about where we’ve come from and – post-Brexit (the film’s obvious metaphor) – what we’ve become. It isn’t so much that it’s angry, more… resigned. This is our lot now, and it isn’t much.

As the title tells us, years have passed. The UK has become one giant quarantine zone, with borders patrolled by European navies who’ll shoot any escapees on sight. One community is eking out a modest existence, however. An island only accessible at low-tide is hanging on to notions of community, family and solidarity. It is here that we meet 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams), who’s given his first taste of hunting infected on the mainland by his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Through Jamie we’re afforded a lot of exposition, particularly pertaining to the types of infected on offer in the new world. Much like a video game – The Last of Us or Left 4 Dead franchises sprang instantly to mind – there are now ‘slow ones’, ‘fast ones’ and ‘alphas’; spinal column-ripping beefy boys who are quite possibly Raging on steroids. 

Spike’s mother Isla (Jodie Comer) is ailing. Confused, amnesiac and unwell, her prognosis is acutely guessable. When Spike hears tell of a mad doctor (Ralph Fiennes) still living on the mainland, however, he defies the community and ventures into harm’s way for the sake of dear ol’ mam. 

One might almost venture that what unfolds is Spielbergian; an uncanny – nay wondrous – coming of age adventure that foregrounds a plucky young hero, discovering the world against overwhelming adversity… Except it’s been fed through screenwriter Alex Garland’s blackly comic mental woodchipper. What’s come out the other side is a bloody mixture of recent preoccupations (tribal conflict; folk horror; apocalyptic psychedelia) and new ones (err, Jimmy Saville, apparently). Traces of recognisable post-apocalyptic templates are here (the walled settlement; the miracle child), but the mixture is often surprising or off-kilter from expectations. While doing duty as the opening act of a new trilogy, 28 Years Later also divides neatly into its own evolving three-act structure, passing a baton from Taylor-Johnson to Comer and finally to Fiennes. 

But the constant throughout is young Alfie Williams who manages to spare us some of the kid-centric irritations that marred 2007’s overlooked 28 Weeks Later and who proves a solid anchor for Garland and Boyle’s episodic misadventures through bucolic Britain. As is common with Boyle, the urge to get finickity with the camera sometimes kicks us out of the moment (even if bullet-time applied to heads struck by arrows is kinda cool). But the core four actors always brings us back into the story. Comer and Fiennes are on particularly fine form, even if this isn’t exactly a shocking revelation. But they all exist around the edges of Williams’ naively optimistic Spike; endearing without being saccharin or cocky. 

The surprisingly maudlin third act is where 28 Years Later may divide audiences. It slows down, pausing in the shadow of COVID-19 and the crumbling of the NHS. Fiennes is a disarmingly genteel presence as Dr. Kelson, reminiscent of Michael Fassbender’s David from Alien: Covenant minus the craven psychopathology. A self-stylised mythic figure in a world without rules. Here the film grows contemplative of the artist’s role in memorialising what’s been lost. 

Boyle’s film is as distracted by grief as Ridley Scott’s gloomy Alien prequel, but this is balanced elsewhere with plenty of bizarre events and humour (showing my age, a nod to a ’90s Tango ad got me laughing). There’s plenty of insanity involving infected on the fringes of the story, but the centre is deeply human; the instinct to put a tourniquet even on a wound that’s too far gone. The tonal mishmash is as abrasive as the editing, but the consistency makes it all feel deliberate enough. 

As the melancholy chords of Godspeed You! Black Emperor eschew in the coda, one gets the sense of an ending, but what comes after is likely to be the biggest bone of contention here. I’m not convinced at this stage, and the decisions going forward will make or break Nia DaCosta’s forthcoming 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. Boyle and Garland leave us with a freak-out worthy of an Aphex Twin music video. God only knows what US audiences will make of it without the looming cultural touchstone. But, for all the movie’s internal dissonances, this feels like Danny Boyle reinvigorated. It’s probably his best film in 20 years.