Stream It Or Skip It?

Twenty-three years after 28 Days Later comes 28 Years Later (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video), and if you don’t mind, we’re just going to skip over 28 Weeks Later. So Years is technically the third movie in the series, although it’s being treated like the second, since director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland return to the series after making the first movie one of the best zombie flicks ever. The new film has been a critical (88 percent on the Tomatometer) and financial success ($150 million global box office), which is a good thing not for those of us looking for something worth watching, but for the filmmakers, who’ve already shot a fourth film, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, with key cast members returning – Alfie Williams, Ralph Fiennes, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Cillian Murphy reprising his role from Days – albeit directed by Nia DaCosta (The Marvels, Candyman). The next movie is due in January, 2026, which is about enough time to psychologically recover from the current one’s vibrant display of human emotions and human spines.

The Gist: And by “human spines” I mean they’re ripped right out of the humans in lovely bloody detail, heads still attached. NEAT. That’s what the alpha zombies do, and they’re scary as hell. But we’re not quite there yet. Twenty-eight years after the rage-virus outbreak that turned zillions of civilians into Fast Zombies, mainland Europe has eradicated the illness and apparently resumed making TikToks and ordering junk from Amazon, but the British isles are a quarantine zone, overrun with the undead, with uninfected survivors left to fend for themselves. The island of Lindisfarne is a hop and a skip off the U.K. mainland, a healthy quarantine within the larger quarantine where a village of folk live a near-medieval existence, fashioning bows and arrows for protection and toting buckets of water, because plumbing is something that apparently hasn’t been sorted yet. They fish and raise sheep and wear baseball caps and hoodies, and an old flashlight might provide a little artificial light if the batteries are still holding on. 

Here, we meet a family of three: Jamie (Taylor-Johnson) is a burly forager type, Isla (Jodie Comer) is his bedridden wife and Spike (Williams) is their 12-year-old son. At breakfast we learn that bacon is a luxury – and so is medicine, as Isla is a mental and physical shambles without a diagnosis, treatment or medicine. Today is to be Spike’s rite of passage into manhood: Jamie will lead him to the U.K. mainland, where the kid will kill his first zombie. The other residents cheer them on. Is it kind of culty around here? Yeah. It’s a little weird, infected with its own brand of regional madness, but everyone seems nice, although we kinda thought that in the first act of Midsommar, didn’t we? Not that we go in that direction, especially compared to what’s happening in Zombieville, on the other side of a land bridge that disappears at high tide.

We get a good glimpse of the reigning chaos as gung-ho manly man Jamie has Spike put his well-honed archery skills to work, in the direction of a brand of zombie that crawls along the ground, slow and bloated, scarfing worms out of the moss. Spike learns all kinds of harsh manly truthy realities from his father: “The more you kill, the easier it gets,” “(The zombie’s) got no mind, it’s got no soul” and “There’s strange people on the mainland” are among the bons mot Jamie shares. They have quite the adventure, killing some fat zombies and some fast zombies and dodging an alpha – and seeing a fire over yonder. Upon their return, Spike learns that the fire is rumored to belong to the only known living medical practitioner in the isles. Disillusioned by some of his father’s testosteronic behavior, Spike packs up the ailing Isla and takes her to the mainland in hopes that this hopefully-a-doctor can help her. Easier said than done? OF COURSE IT IS.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It may seem self-evident that Boyle is better than Zach Snyder, but 28 Years Later is far more memorable than the last signpost zombie film, Army of the Dead.

Performance Worth Watching: This movie is full of fine acting: A heartbreaking turn by Comer and an extraordinary feature debut from Williams, who’s the functional lead, immediately stand out. But it’s the third-act emergence of Fiennes that gooses a film from flagging to vibrant just when it needs it.

Memorable Dialogue: The Fiennes character: “There are many kinds of death. And some are better than others.”

Sex and Skin: A veritable plethora of extremely gross zombie nudity. Prosthetics abound!

Our Take: 28 Years Later shifts narrative and tonal gears in such a manner that some will deem it muddled or inconsistent. But I found it enlivening, entirely congruent with Boyle’s uptempo, patchwork style. It offers a distinct intensity from the director, who indulges in enough distracting stylistic flourishes, the film feels hectic and overwhelming during the first act. But Boyle – notably shooting entirely on iPhones – concocts some otherworldly imagery, memorable for its strange beauty and suggestiveness. The film does eventually find its groove, when Spike and Isla undertake their adventure, leading to a third-act left turn that somewhat mirrors that of 28 Days Later, and lifts it provocatively out of the confines of genre.

Which is to say, Garland and Boyle have more on their minds than a bare-bones story about what it takes to survive extreme conditions. The nuances of any political allegory was mostly lost on me beyond the basics of Brexit-related isolationism – the rest of Europe seems content with sitting back and watching the U.K. go feral and primitive; meanwhile, the residents on Lindisfarne have regressed to a quietly religious sense of ritual, with the mainland folk seemingly splitting into bizarre sects (something hinted at in a cold open and in the final scene, and likely to be more fully explored in The Bone Temple). 

More universal is Spike’s coming-of-age, where he’s forced to learn the harshness of life, death and survival long before he considers the stuff of more modern narratives, e.g., love, sex, finding your passion and your place in the world. The film is Spike’s deeply melancholy awakening in many ways. Even more profound is Garland’s exploration of the philosophies of death, conveyed by Fiennes in a typically invigorating performance that incorporates deep, empathetic kindness and great madness all at once. It’s in these moments that the apocalyptic context affords mercy as much as brutality in a profound and fascinating manner. Perhaps those scenes sit uneasily next to those in which seemingly steroid-amped alpha zombies rip heads off, but such is the extremity of the human experience.

Our Call: It’s very, very corny, but just as true, to say the zombie-movie subgenre is all but undead at this point – but 28 Years Later is inventive enough to reinvigorate it. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.