Danny Boyle’s ‘28 Years Later’ redefines zombie movies again

Danny Boyle is a master filmmaker who has never quite received the accolades he deserves, while also never really achieving the level of mastery of which he’s capable, like Martin Scorsese or Stanley Kubrick. While his films like 1996’s Trainspotting changed how drug movies were made and 2002’s 28 Days Later redefined zombies forever, it wasn’t until 2008’s Slumdog Millionaire and its boatload of Oscars, BAFTA’s, and Golden Globes did the world start paying attention to his unique eye for filmmaking.

Because here’s the thing: Boyle never stops innovating. Shooting 28 Days Later on a tiny DV camera allowed them to empty normally bustling areas of London for brief moments of filming so they could make the city look empty of life. There are shots of Mercury placed against the vastness of the sun in his unsung masterpiece Sunshine that I have replaying in my head once a week. From his partnership with writer Alex Garland to his continual work with groundbreaking cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, Boyle’s worst movie still carries a dozen singular moments no one else would attempt.

Now, over two decades later, we have the epic and intimate 28 Years Later, the sequel to 28 Days Later that returns Boyle to the director’s chair and Garland as scribe (neither of whom had anything to do with 2007’s forgettable sequel 28 Weeks Later). Once again, Boyle takes the path of most resistance and crafts a zombie movie that feels more like a family drama at times than a horror movie, while also playing as a critique of Brexit, an epic road movie, a deconstruction of Apocalypse Now, and a decidedly insane re-imagining of A Clockwork Orange. Do all these disparate tones fit together? I have no idea.

The new film picks up 28 years after the Rage Virus (basically making people zombies… but they’re not dead, just insane) was released in the United Kingdom, there’s still a blockade keeping everyone on the island from leaving, meaning the rest of the world still has cell phones, gets Amazon deliveries, and is living their lives like nothing is wrong. The movie focuses on an isolationist society living in a village on Lindisfarne, an island connected to the mainland by a small causeway that becomes impassable at high tide.

The first section of 28 Years Later follows 12-year-old Spike (a wonderful Alfie Williams) as he goes with his father, Jamie (Kraven himself, Aaron Taylor-Johnson), to the mainland to hunt the infected with a bow and arrow as a coming-of-age ritual.

Boyle directs this section with a coiled terror, yet also a lyrical intensity and beauty that kept me on the edge of my seat, while reveling in the stunning imagery and gorgeousness of the filmmaking. The infected aren’t dead, they’re just caught deep in the throes of a virus that makes them rage-fueled monsters. So for the last few years, the infected have been mostly starving, relegated to eating worms out of the ground. That’s one of the first innovations Boyle makes with 28 Years Later: the infected in this film are emaciated, screaming and mostly naked, running at you, desperate to tear flesh from bone. That’s terrifying and the scenes of the infected attacking father and son are genuinely shocking, insane and, most surprisingly, profoundly sad.

The second section of the film involves Spike and his mother, Isla (the always powerful Jodie Comer), as they go on their own journey, which I won’t spoil here. While this section is filled with beautiful oddities unlike anything I have ever seen on film, it’s harder to decide if it works as a whole and I’m not sure if this is Boyle’s fault, Garland’s fault, or the fault of a studio system desperate to wring out every dollar of existing intellectual properties.

See, 28 Years Later was filmed back-to-back with its sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, and if both make enough money, are to be followed by a third, unnamed trilogy-capping film. While all three movies are written by Garland, only the first and third will be directed by Boyle, with the second being helmed by Nia DaCosta (2021’s Candyman). This is a weird creative choice because while DaCosta is an interesting and tonally consistent filmmaker, her style is so different from Boyle’s that it’s hard to see how this trilogy will fit together.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m very excited to see The Bone Temple (due for release in January), but it leaves 28 Years Later feeling uncompleted. There is a character named Jimmy, whom we hear about throughout the entire movie, until finally meeting him at the very end in the most tonally insane scene in the film. It feels jarring and fearless in a way I would appreciate more if it wasn’t the very end of a movie with no resolution. It’s somehow very fun, yet deeply unsatisfying, while still making me extremely excited for the sequel. This kind of filmmaking that only exists to build franchises is pretty frustrating, even as I recognize I still love most of the movie we were given.

28 Years Later is a singular, yet disjointed work of art from a filmmaker still obsessed with innovation and the actual craft of storytelling. There are huge swaths of the film shot with an iPhone 15 Pro Max that create some of the most breathlessly intense imagery I’ve seen in a horror film. Simultaneously, there are some huge swings with the story and tone that will make absolutely no sense until the sequel is released, leaving this to feel episodic, random, and incomplete. Ultimately, the film is wildly entertaining, but we’ll need the entire trilogy to really know if this rough beast works as a cohesive work of art or whether it's just a poetic and bizarre mess.

Grade: B