“28 Years Later” Memorializes the Dead

28 Years Later (Danny Boyle, 2025) 3½ out of 5 stars

If one is looking purely for a gorefest, director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland’s follow-up to their seminal 2002 zombie flick 28 Days Later may disappoint. Though filled with some nightmarish images and ideas, it limits the blood flow, unlike its predecessor. Instead, the film offers a moving rumination on the pleasures of everyday living, with the occasional action scene serving as punctuation to its larger treatise.

It’s a strange concoction, but also constantly engaging. Filled with bursts of footage from documentaries and narratives of yore, 28 Years Later acts like a mournful elegy for lost civilization that’s not afraid to throw in a beheading or evisceration now and then. Boyle (Yesterday) and Garland (Civil War) work well together, each possessed of a desire to elevate commercial cinema beyond the ordinary. Though ambition sometimes outpaces effort, they have their moments.

28 Years Later begins in the past (in the timeline of either the first or second movie), where a town in the Scottish Highlands is overrun by the “infected” (as zombies are called in this franchise). One boy, Jimmy (Rocco Haynes), escapes, but only after watching his entire family—including his preacher father proclaiming the Day of Judgement—be wiped out. Cut to an ensuing title card reading “28 years later.”

In the present, we learn via onscreen text, England is quarantined from the rest of the planet, which succeeded in wiping out the rage virus and whose citizens live a life not unlike ours in the real world of today. Ships patrol the coastline, making sure that the infected never make it offshore. Isolated healthy communities remain, carefully guarding their perimeters.

One such locale is the island of Lindisfarne, separated from the mainland by a causeway only visible at low tide. The inhabitants may not exactly prosper but they get by, and one of the ways they ensure their survival is by training young people to kill the infected with traditional bows and arrows.

As the story kicks off, a father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, The Wall) and his 12-year-old son, Spike (Alfie Williams), prepare to go off-island for the boy’s coming-of-age initiation. Spike’s a bit young (they usually go out at 13 or 14), but Jamie thinks it’s time. Staying at home is Spike’s sick mother, Isla (Jodie Comer, Free Guy), who barely knows what day it is.

And off they go, introducing us to Lindisfarne’s security system (natural and fabricated). Into the wild gross yonder, accompanied by Boyle’s constant cuts to the aforementioned movie clips, the result of which is deep nostalgia for a destroyed universe. The England that stretches before them is full of threats, including forms of the infected that have evolved since last we met them. Some are slow, others fast, and still others a new breed of “alpha” with a penchant for tearing heads off with the spinal cord still attached. All Jamie and Spike have are arrows, but it only takes one killing blow to the head or heart to stop an attack.

Things don’t go as planned, but one of the twists is that this is only the first part of the story. There’s an entire second sequence involving the great Ralph Fiennes (Coup 53)—really, this man can do no wrong—and an attempt to cure Isla of what ails her that ennobles the entire enterprise. And after that profound experience, there’s still an epilogue to come. Fiennes is a gift to the acting world, and young Williams more than holds his own.

There’s a clear setup at the end for further sequels, so perhaps we’ll return—28 decades later?—for further revelations. Here, though I remain confused on some of the virus details (where do the alphas come from and why are some infected fast and not slow?), the latter half of the film is such a beautiful cinematic testament to the human spirit that the inconsistencies only bothered me later. Memento mori: remember the dead, and celebrate the living. It’s a beautiful takeaway.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.