Now, at long last, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland are back for 28 Years Later, the long-awaited third chapter and the start of a new trilogy. The film is bringing old-school vibes, new ideas, and plenty of signature creativity to the screen.
It’s been a wild 23 years since Boyle and Garland’s 28 Days Later changed horror forever, turning fast zombies into a terrifying new standard. Then came 2007’s 28 Weeks Later, which upped the panic and body count but lost a little of the original’s heart.
Set nearly three decades after the original outbreak, 28 Years Later follows young Spike (Alfie Williams), a boy raised his whole life on a tiny island fort with his toxic survivalist dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and bedridden mum Isla (Jodie Comer). Spike’s father takes him on his first trip to the infected Scottish mainland to teach him how to fend for himself and build confidence against killing the infected, and then things get gross fast.
Infected are now older and more weathered, have lost all their clothes and are running around naked in full rage, while others have mutated into strange, sluggish, dirt-eating creatures. They’re filthy and somehow unsettling, but a little funny to watch. It definitely shows that Boyle took the old Rage virus monsters and left them in the woods for 28 years to rot.
The first act is the film’s strongest, packed with disgusting horror moments that stick in your head and make you gag. Weird night vision shots, gut-chomping creatures, flashes of Cannibal Holocaust-style madness. It’s classic gore horror, and fans will love this.
Once the pair returns, Spike’s father has forced his young son to witness a lot of horror and lied about his heroic adventures, which makes him even more uncomfortable. The movie then gets a little messy. Spike makes a baffling decision to drag his sick mother onto the mainland to find a doctor he thinks he saw, which leads to a series of bad choices, nonsense survival logic even for a kid, and some head-scratching near-death encounters. This includes a very silly scene where a slow zombie somehow sneaks right up and chews on Spike’s shoelaces without waking him.
We eventually meet Ralph Fiennes as a mysterious doctor who is sorely underused, and an annoying but logical Swedish soldier (Edvin Ryding) who actually has some sense to him and gets killed for his efforts. Jodie Comer flips from frail to rage-fuelled super mum in one confusing moment that the movie never explains. Is she infected? Is she not? We never really find out.
The biggest tonal whiplash comes at the end when Spike stumbles into what feels like an entirely different movie with a strange new group and a bizarre cult leader vibe. It’s so sudden and odd, you can practically hear the sequel setup loading in the background. It’s exciting but also jarring.
Visually, this movie looks great and is certainly a breath of fresh, decomposing air. Boyle’s directing and Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography make even the grossest scenes look great. The snippets of music placed throughout the film are timed excellently to deliver emotion or present to us sweeping plains. The soundtrack by Young Fathers is brilliantly matched to the dirt-covered world.
One of the best things about 28 Years Later is its setting. Swapping the empty city streets and crumbling suburbs of the last two films for the damp, overgrown Scottish mainland and lonely island fort is a great change of scenery. The mossy forests, rotting countryside, and grey skies are ripe with danger. The signature shaky close-ups, eerie wide shots, and unsettling editing work just like the original. That said, a few strange CG effects do pop up and break the immersion here and there.
For a handful of brutal kills, the crew rigged up a row of iPhones to capture the moment from multiple angles as an infected’s skull gets blown apart, spraying gore, bone, and brains out the other side in glorious detail. It’s almost like something out of Sniper Elite. The result is a split-second slow-mo sequence that looks equal parts creative and gory on screen. It’s a little showy, sure, but in a movie this unhinged, it works.
28 Years Later is a strange, fascinating, flawed return to a beloved horror world. The first act is amazing, gore-horror filmmaking that is sick, gross, and terrifying. But when the plot kicks in, logic dies faster than humans on the mainland. If you liked the first two films and want to see what a 28 Years Later world looks like, this is worth watching. Just prepare for some weird left turns.
28 Years Later is in cinemas now.
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Checkpoint Gaming attended a screening of 28 Years Later as a guest of Sony Pictures Australia.
