Joyce Glasser reviews 28 Years Later (June 20, 2025), Cert. 15, 115 mins. In cinemas
It’s been 26 years since the powerhouse team of director Danny Boyle (Shallow Grave) and writer Alex Garland (The Beach) gave us 28 Days Later. Garland has since gone on to write, direct and produce films of his own, including Civil War. Boyle became a household name after winning an Academy Award for Slumdog Millionaire and directing the London Olympics.
Boyle’s most recent accomplishment is getting the “28” franchise (28 Weeks Later from 2007 was made by a completely different team with Boyle’s blessing) back on track with the addition of sequels to 28 Years Later with a planned release for 2026.
If you didn’t know this you will sense it from the structure of 28 Years Later, notably, the bookended prologue (where a young Jimmy’s mother urges him to run from disaster on “judgment day” clutching a religious heirloom) and the final scene [spoiler alert] where the now adult Jimmy encounters Spike (Alfie Williams), the young protagonist in the present film. The transition from violent horror movie to a coming-of-age saga with the 12-year-old in need of a friend or a surrogate father, points the way toward the continuation of the story.
Although the concept originated way before COVID, it is hard to dismiss allegorical readings of the story. If we recall the theory that Covid began in a Chinese laboratory, we can remember that so did 28 Days Later, with another Jimmy (Cillian Murphy) waking up from an induced coma and wandering into a lab full of infected apes. Years later, the infected have mutated to include “alpha” humanoid creatures who are huge, upright and much harder to kill. We witness an infected female giving birth so they are not “dead.”
Though not zombies, these hideous creatures are killing machines. For this reason scavenger Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), his wife Isla (Jodie Comer), bedridden with an undiagnosed illness, and their 12-year-old son Spike live within a walled community on what must be the almost-isle of Lindisfarne. There is a long causeway that provides some protection, but also access to the mainland, and is subject to flooding from the tides, thus cutting the island off twice daily.
Jamie believes Spike is old enough to accompany him to the mainland and has been training him with handmade bows and arrows. The pair set out on a kind of video-game quest to stay alive for 24 hours with the infected showing up in the forest, in the meadows and in derelict buildings. It’s like a field test at the ophthalmologist to check your peripheral vision. The game is to spot them in time to send an arrow into the neck. Yes, you jump and sweat a bit, but, unlike 28 Days Later, the action grows monotonous.
Part of the reason is that we are more detached from the reality of this film. A curiosity in that while suffering and shortages are clearly the status quo in this desperate community with the exception of a qualified doctor, we don’t feel it. The filmmakers follow the route of super-hero movies and the Mission Impossible franchise in dispensing with such mundanities as eating (no raids on the abandoned Budgens as in 28 Days Later) and sleeping. Amidst the carnage in 28 Days Later warrior Selena (Naomie Harris), shuts the door to catch up on sleep. Nor do these survivors need showers or clean laundry. After a dirty, wet, smelly, sweaty, and perhaps contagious outing on the mainland, Jamie jumps into Isla’s bed, unwashed and fully clothed.
During the celebrations that mark the pair’s return (although empty handed), Spike catches his father cheating on his mother with a young local woman and bans Jamie from his mother’s bedroom, assuming the role of carer. Having learned that a fire he saw on the mainland was the home of the estranged, and reportedly deranged, survivor Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), Spike decides to take his mother for a diagnosis.
This father and son rupture leads to the second section of the film. Dr Ian Kelson has spent the last years collecting and burning dead bodies and mounting the sterilised skulls on what has become a huge tree or a memento mori sculpture in a grim sculpture park. He has not only managed to survive himself, but instead of killing the infected, he paralyses them with a morphine dart. That the scarce drug has not run out is like the miracle of the water and wine.
At first, the introduction of Ralph Fiennes is enough to engage us, but this strand, too, seems to be leading only to implausibility and sentimentality. Spike’s coming of age continues with a tragedy.
On the way to find Dr Kelson Spike and Isla meet a young, handsome Swedish NATO survivor, Erik Sundqvist (Edvin Ryding) bringing together detached images of soldiers that appear embedded in the film as if in a hallucination in the main narrative. Although Erik saves the mother and son, Isla adopts the filmmakers’ reverence for child birth and a new life trumps loyalty, gratitude, safety, common sense and the living. Isla as the representative Female, spots an infected woman in labour and insists on helping her.
Spike has learned that there are enemies he must fear, protectors whom he cannot trust, and strangers who will save his life. In the short, final segment, Spike finds himself taking stock: refusing to return to the village but ill equipped to live on his own.
It is here that the most amusing and unexpected surprise awaits us. But alas, it is the link to the promising next sequel, and insufficient to save 28 Years Later from being an inferior shadow of 28 Days Later.
