Two decades after 28 Days Later redefined the zombie genre with its visual storytelling, director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland have returned with 28 Years Later, a long-awaited sequel that builds upon — and strays — from the DNA of the 2002 classic.
The film, which hit screens on June 20, fuses survival horror with political allegory, mythic world-building, and a tragic family drama.
The result is a haunting, disjointed, yet exhilarating patchwork of a movie.
The nostalgia stops at the credits. 28 Years Later begins not in post-apocalyptic London but in the Scottish Highlands, where a group of children are watching Teletubbies as the world outside implodes. The intrusion of the infected into their cottage is swift and savage. The cold open ends with one child escaping into a world already lost.
Then, as with the previous instalments, Boyle jumps forward in time by almost three decades. Now, the virus remains confined to the British Isles. Europe has quarantined the infected island, patrolled by French and Swedish naval forces.
The audience lands on Holy Island, off the coast of Northumberland. It’s a place that has regressed into a medieval society, surrounded by water, accessible only at low tide via a causeway. The infection still rages on the mainland, but this self-contained community has built its own world from scratch. Residents here use wood-fired stoves, hand-crafted arrows, and a strict code of survival.
It’s here that we meet 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) and his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a stoic woodsman preparing his son for a coming-of-age ritual: the first kill of an infected. Spike’s mother Isla (Jodie Comer) lies bedridden, stricken by illness.
When the father-son duo venture into the forest, 28 Years Later revs into horror mode. The infected have mutated. There are slow, slithering giants — nicknamed ‘Slow-Lows’ — and frenzied naked sprinters, familiar from the earlier films.
But there’s also something new: the Alpha. Towering, intelligent, terrifying, and hard to kill. When the Alpha disrupts Spike’s initiation, he and Jamie take refuge, catching sight of a distant fire burning across the water. It belongs to Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), a figure half-mad and half-myth, whose role in the story becomes clearer only in the film’s poetic final act.
For now, Spike returns home, only to uncover a truth about Jamie that fractures his trust. In a moment of impulsive hope, he sets off with his mother, dragging her across the causeway at low tide in search of Kelson, believing he might hold a cure for his ailing mum.
Spike encounters a pregnant infected woman, a Swedish soldier, and ghostly landscapes tinged with melancholy. Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle shoots these scenes with startling beauty. It’s a far cry from the grimy London streets of 28 Days Later, but the dread persists.
Enter Dr Kelson. Fiennes plays him with an air of quiet devastation. Here’s a man who’s seen too much, who knows too much, and who has resigned himself to the futility of hope. Suddenly, 28 Years Later becomes less about infection and more about grief and the burden of survival.
Garland’s script touches upon many themes. Some land, others don’t. Pitfalls of militarism through archival footage of wars feels underexplored. The religious undertones, introduced early on with a priest’s fire-and-brimstone monologue, also fizzle out. And right when the audience was settling in for a zombie apocalypse, the narrative takes a philosophical turn.
In the end, 28 Years Later is rooted not just in gore, but in the emotional toll of watching a child come of age in a world where growing up means confronting death daily. Alfie Williams is a revelation. His Spike is brave but fragile. Comer, too, is remarkable, with her performance toggling between pain and protectiveness. Together, they carry the emotional weight of a film that keeps pushing against the boundaries of its genre.