’28 Years Later’ Review: Jodie Comer and Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Danny Boyle’s White-Knuckle Sequel to His Apocalyptic Game-Changer

A little over two decades ago, director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland scared the bejesus out of audiences with their kinetic reinvention of the zombie apocalypse movie, 28 Days Later. Both as high-intensity nail-biter and sharp political allegory, the 2002 feature remains among the most influential horror of the 21st century. While acknowledging a debt to the maestro, it left George A. Romero’s lumbering undead in the dust, with fast-moving flesh-eaters that descended like a swarm on a ravaged Great Britain, isolated from the rest of the world.

Emotionally charged, visceral and immersive, the new sequel 28 Years Later subverts expectations in many ways, not least by making a 12-year-old boy — Spike, played with a poignant balance of vulnerability and resilience by terrific newcomer Alfie Williams — the indisputable protagonist. The movie goes beyond a survival thriller by introducing tender familial drama, a stirring spiritual thread and notes of sly humor. (A Shell gas station with a missing ‘S’ on its iconic sign is a nice touch, as is an attached diner called Happy Eater.)

This first part of a planned trilogy demonstrates that Boyle and Garland still have plenty of fresh inspiration for pulse-pounding terror. While the director has repeatedly distanced 28 Days Later from the “zombie” label, his exciting new “rage virus” installment is in a league not just with his own earlier film but other genre standouts like Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan.

Skipping over the events of Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 2007 sequel, 28 Weeks Later, Garland’s script starts with an amusing dig at British isolationism, noting that the virus was driven back from continental Europe to be contained on the U.K. mainland. It’s kind of like a reverse Brexit, flooding the island with the unwanted infected and leaving the Brits to fend for themselves, their shores patrolled by European military boats.

There’s an irreverent vein also in the prologue, showing a group of young children trying to ignore the worrying noises coming from adults in the next room while they watch a Teletubbies episode. Those gibberish-spouting creatures, with their fixed smiles, vacant eyes and TV monitors embedded in their stomachs, could be someone’s trippy idea of infantilized post-apocalyptic humanoids.

When a frenzied cluster of infected, as the virus carriers are known collectively, bursts through the door and the screaming starts, the video image of Dipsy, Laa-Laa, Po and Tinky-Winky gets splashed with blood. One child, Jimmy, manages to escape, fleeing to a nearby church where it’s revealed he’s the son of a preacher man. His minister father is clearly deranged, welcoming the deathly mob to the “Day of Judgment,” but not before pressing a crucifix into Jimmy’s trembling hand, telling the boy to keep it with him always. It’s a sure thing that Jimmy will resurface.

Spike lives with his parents, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Isla (Jodie Comer), on Holy Island, a land mass off the northeast coast of England, separated from the mainland by a causeway accessible only at low tide. Isla is largely confined to bed upstairs, feverish with an undiagnosed illness that gives her severe pain and erratic lucidity. The lack of surviving doctors or medical treatments likely means her sickness will have to run its course, one way or another.

Members of the tight-knit community living behind fortress walls have designated roles — farmer, hunter, fisherman, forager, baker, etc. They have fashioned a society along the lines of earlier times, untouched by the developments of the modern world beyond their outpost.

In this respect, Boyle and Garland give the new chapter shadings of British folk horror, an aspect enhanced by inserts of footage depicting England at war throughout history, from medieval times to WWII. Likewise herds of stampeding deer, flocks of crows overhead, and the eerie placement of Rudyard Kipling’s 1903 warfare poem “Boots,” heard in an unsettling voiceover.

Although he’s a couple years shy of the usual age at which islanders undertake their first expedition to the mainland, Jamie decides Spike is sufficiently mature and skilled in archery to accompany him on the crossing and notch up his first kill of an infected. The community’s festive send-off identifies this as an important rite of passage, though the gatekeeper reminds Spike that no rescuers or search parties will be sent after colonists that fail to return.

While pockets of survivors have stepped back in time, the infected have continued to evolve in new variants — not unlike the Cordyceps mutants on The Last of Us.

The corpulent, slug-like ground-crawlers known as “Slow-Lows” are fleshy misshapen blobs with slimy undersides that look like grotesque Botero sculptures. The infected familiar from the original virus strain are now sinewy figures wandering the land, feral and naked, their clothes having disintegrated long ago.

The most dangerous are the hulking Berserkers, more commonly known as “Alphas,” on whom the virus has had a steroidal effect, allowing them to tear the heads off victims and swing them around by their spinal cords. The chief specimen here (played by MMA fighter Chi Lewis-Parry) is a massive beast whose brute strength is matched by his cunning. Not to mention his pendulous whopper of a penis, a prosthetic that rivals Alexander Skarsgard’s in Pillion.

All goes well at first as Jamie guides Spike through verdant woodlands and fields, reminding him to aim for the head or heart. The lad soon enough nails his first kill, planting a lethal arrow in a Slow-Low. The more interesting part of the scene is the evidence of family groups having formed among the infected.

The mournful cries of nearby Slow-Lows draw attention from other infected in the area, who plant themselves along the top of a picturesque hill waiting for the Alpha’s signal to attack. That stunning long shot is a classic English pastoral scene, its bucolic tranquility broken by menacing savages that look like refugees from an earlier millennium.

The flight through the forest is one of many thrilling sequences, with the infected hot on Jamie and Spike’s heels, coming at them faster than they can aim their arrows. They take refuge in an abandoned farm building, hiding out in the loft until low tide the following morning. During the night, Spike spots a fire in the distance, which Jamie shrugs off as nothing.

At the celebration that follows their hair-raising return to Holy Island, Spike is disturbed by his father’s exultant untruths, regaling the crowd with false accounts of his son’s heroics when the squeamish boy had been too petrified to be of use during the attack.

That confusion about his father’s dishonesty is magnified when he observes Jamie sneaking off from the party to have sex with a young village woman. Even more so when old-timer family friend Sam (Christopher Fulford) tells him the fire he saw was probably lit by Dr. Kerson (Ralph Fiennes), a former physician known for his eccentric ways. Jamie says Kerson is insane, but Spike is now convinced he’s a liar.

Following a bitter clash with his dad, Spike sets up a distraction in order to get his dying mother off the island and travel through dangerous countryside in search of the doctor he hopes can cure her. The bond between Spike and his mother becomes the heart of the film, rendered more affecting by Isla’s delirium, which causes her constantly to confuse her son with her late father. But she’s sufficiently present for her maternal instinct to kick in during a close call, revealed through the haze of her mind.

While the cast across the board is solid, and Taylor-Johnson conveys the conflicts of a loving father and husband in dark times, Comer is the movie’s standout. Isla slowly and subtly transforms on the mainland from her bedraggled, sickly appearance, becoming more beautiful, as if she’s drawing strength from nature.

There are gripping interludes in which they travel for a time with young Swedish Naval officer Erik (Edvin Ryding), the last survivor of a patrol boat wrecked on the shores of Scotland. “Scotch on the rocks,” he waggishly calls it, a reference as mystifying to Spike as the stranger’s cellphone and night-vision helmet. (Erik laments that he should have been a delivery driver, in what seems a nod back to the Cillian Murphy character’s profession as a bicycle courier in the first movie.) Perhaps the boldest scene takes place in a train carriage, where Isla comes to the aid of an infected in distress, inadvertently alerting the Alpha to their presence.

The movie is at its most moving when they finally reach Kerson and behold the magnificent “Memento Mori” temple he has built out of skulls and bones to honor the dead, while he also honors love among the living by protecting Spike and Isla, bringing them peace. (That elaborate set is the masterstroke of production and costume designers Gareth Pugh and Carson McColl.)

The performances of Comer, Williams and Fiennes give 28 Years Later a soulful core that was also a distinguishing factor in the 2002 original, a testament to the endurance of humanity even in the darkest dystopias. Fiennes is wonderful in the choice supporting role of Kerson, half possessed wild man and half learned man of science, his body daubed in iodine, which acts as a deterrent to the infected.

Shot by Anthony Dod Mantle on the sprawling canvas of the 2.76:1 widescreen aspect ratio often used for IMAX or Ultra Panavision 70, the movie’s visual textures are intoxicating. The dynamic muscularity of the camerawork is matched by Jon Harris’ similarly agile editing, laced with nerve-jangling smash cuts. And Johnnie Burn’s enveloping sound design works in seamless tandem with the wide-ranging score by Scottish indie art pop/alternative hip hop outfit Young Fathers.

Boyle has always been a genius in his inventive use of music (the sequence featuring Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” in Trainspotting is an all-timer). Here, he weaves in disturbing passages of ambient synth distortion with propulsive action riffs, bristling with violent drumbeats. Any film that includes both the solemn 19th century Scottish hymn “Abide With Me” and a ferocious blast of death metal is not playing it safe.

One of the chief rewards of 28 Years Later is that it never feels like a cynical attempt to revisit proven material merely for commercial reasons. Instead, the filmmakers appear to have returned to a story whose allegorical commentary on today’s grim political landscape seems more relevant than ever. Intriguing narrative building blocks put in place for future installments mean they can’t come fast enough.