The gory, underrated 28 Weeks Later (2007), the sequel to 28 Days Later (2002), ended with scenes of the “infected” rampaging through Paris. So the attempt by the US military to rebuild life in London, or at least in the Isle of Dogs, had failed – and the horror spread to the continent.
Now, 23 years later, after languishing long in development hell, here’s the third installment in the franchise. Danny Boyle is back directing, Alex Garland writing. Cillian Murphy executive produces but does not appear, not yet anyway: a fourth episode, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, written by Garland but directed by Nia DaCosta (Candyman), was shot back to back with this one and is scheduled for release early next year.
One of the remoter consequences of Brexit may well be that the international contagion established at the end of 28 Weeks Later has been cancelled. Danny Boyle has explained that he just wanted to make it a film set wholly in the UK, like the first: “All the characters are British and they’ve got to solve all these problems themselves. There’s no external force that’s going to come in and save them.” It’s a bit worse than that. The coast is patrolled by foreign navies to make sure no-one ever escapes quarantine. A properly hard Brexit, then.
Far from the spookily deserted London of 28 Days Later, the setting this time is Holy Island, no less recognisable and evocative, an island off the island. Guarding the causeway to the mainland, a self-sufficient community thrives, reverting to traditional roles, gathering wood for fuel, dressed in tatters, relying on bows and arrows, not quite medieval but not far off. Boyle, never knowingly over-subtle, underlines the long history of their struggle not just with that ranting recitation of Kipling’s marching song “Boots”, used in the trailer, but by repeatedly intercutting the famous Agincourt arrow shower from Henry V.
Twelve-year-old Spike (newcomer Alfie Williams, an excellent lead) is taken by his tough dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) on a rite of passage, his first ever trip to the mainland, to confront the infected. “The more you kill, the easier it gets”, his dad assures him, but their expedition unravels.
First the infected, not being dead or even undead, have evolved too over the decades. As well as the speedy originals, now all nude, horribly sinewy and jerky, subsisting on the herds of deer roaming the land, there are the “Slow-Lows”, grotesque specimens, so hideously obese and flabby they can only flobber along the ground, eating worms and chewing repulsively. And then there are the Alphas, leading the pack, “bigger, smarter”, given to ripping off heads with half the spinal column still attached and using them as clubs; the most monstrous, Samson, being played by 6’8” but still prosthetically-enhanced MMA fighter, Chi Lewis-Parry.
Boyle makes these action sequences scary and frenetic, using a lot of trickery, not just fast cuts, sudden stops and unnerving, unstable and immersive camera-work from his cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle, but also interspersing footage of the infected and wild animals shot with lurid red thermal imaging, among other treats. So zombie-fans are generously served. And then the film veers into the portenteous.
Spike’s mum Isla (Jodie Comer, Killing Eve) is sick and he has heard there is a doctor on the mainland. They set off, passing by both the Angel of the North and the Sycamore Gap tree, to find this mystery man, rumoured to run a camp full of corpses. Dr Kelso turns out to be the complete Colonel Kurtz, always a temptation to Alex Garland’s imagination. He is, moreover, Ralph Fiennes, Shakespearean by default or perhaps to a fault, these days. Covered in iodine, Dr Kelso is also the only man ever to be more blatantly orange than Donald Trump. Over the years, he has constructed a vast monument to the dead, a temple centred on a tower of skulls of both the infected and their victims, “because they are alike”, he says compassionately.
“Do you know the words memento mori?” he enquires, teaching Spike their meaning, showing him that some deaths are better than others and that love too must be remembered. So a zombie movie reaches for a higher meaning, almost the founding of a new religion.
Alex Garland’s mission statement has always been quite simply: apocalypse now. Social breakdown and its baroque consequences are what excite him. Last year, in Civil War, set in the States, he made these concerns disturbingly relevant to contemporary reality. Here, though, Garland and Boyle have produced an exclusively British horror film, a hokey play on how readily we revert to isolation.
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This article appears in the 25 Jun 2025 issue of the New Statesman, State of Emergency