28 Weeks Later Director: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo Cast: Robert Carlyle, Rose Byrne, Jeremy Renner, Harold Perrineau, Catherine McCormack

Nothing satisfies the appetite for allegory quite like a movie about flesh-eating zombies. Somehow the genre, at least as practiced by its masters, has the capacity to illuminate some brute facts about the human condition and its contemporary dysfunctions. There are not many recent movies that match, for example, the social criticism undertaken by George Romero in his Living Dead cycle.

Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and its new sequel, 28 Weeks Later, directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, may not quite be in Romero’s league, but at their best they come close to his signature blend of grisly horror, emotional impact and biting satire. There is, of course, plenty of literal biting as well, since the virus-crazed creatures known as ‘infecteds’ crave the flesh and blood of their erstwhile fellow citizens.

And also their metaphorical flesh and blood. The story begins with a terrible failure of nerve. Fleeing a zombie attack, Don (a gaunt, appropriately anxious Robert Carlyle) abandons his wife, Alice (Catherine McCormack), to a gruesome and apparently inevitable fate. A few months later, he is safe in the Green Zone, an island of security in London overseen by occupying American troops. There, he is reunited with his children, who had been on a school trip to Spain during the initial outbreak. He lies to them about their mother’s fate, and his dishonesty is punished in due course.

28 Weeks Later is not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. It is brutal and almost exhaustingly terrifying, as any respectable zombie movie should be. It is also bracingly smart, both in its ideas and in its techniques. The last shot brought a burst of laughter at the screening I attended, a reaction that seemed to me both an acknowledgment of Fresnadillo’s wit and a defence against his merciless rigor.

A.. Scott (The New York Times)