Review: 28 Years Later (2025)

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Director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland return to the genre they revitalized with 28 Years Later, a different kind of late sequel, which eschews the legacy angle (so far) in order to take the franchise into deeper, darker, and more esoteric directions. It’s an effective zombie sequel that refuses to play it safe—which will be alienating for some—even as it sets up a new trilogy for the until-recently dormant franchise.

Coming in the wake of The Walking Dead, The Last of Us, and all the other zombie entertainment that has dominated media in the 23 years since 2002’s 28 Days Later, 28 Years Later plays more recognizably as a zombie survival horror film than the original did. For instance, it quickly establishes clear rules for this world where the Rage Virus has eradicated the United Kingdom; as the opening titles explain, the British Isles are quarantined from the rest of Europe by a NATO blockade. The film then has the characters attempt to follow these rules while navigating this world and avoiding the Infected. Accordingly, the film is interested in finite supplies (for example, the number of arrows the characters can carry is key to their survival) and sneaking as an alternative to fighting. In this way, the movie recalls many of the survival horror video games even more so than adaptations of said games, whether the Resident Evil franchise or The Last of Us. The approach that Boyle and Garland take also demonstrates that, unlike the original film, 28 Years Later is working within an established playbook that didn’t exist in 2002 when 28 Days Later came out.

In the film, we meet the inhabitants of a small island off the coast of the UK, which is only connected by a narrow causeway that is submerged during high tide. Alfie Williams plays Spike, a 12-year-old boy ready for his first trip to the mainland, a rite of manhood he undertakes with his rugged hunter dad, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). In the early scenes of 28 Years Later, we observe Jamie and Spike’s domestic and island life, which helps us understand the new reality of the British Isles: there’s no electricity, no Internet, no connection with the outside world. These scenes also help us notice the strain in their family, as Jamie’s wife and Spike’s mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), suffers from a mysterious illness. There are no doctors from before the outbreak on the island, so the family is left in the dark navigating Isla’s condition, which causes memory issues and long spells of debilitating pain.

The father and son’s shared trepidation about Isla’s condition, and their divergent ways of dealing with it, creates tension in the family and catalyses the potential fracture between Jamie and Spike. This all comes to a head as they go onto the mainland and Spike learns that a doctor from the old times may still be living there, with a potential answer to what is ailing his mother.

These early scenes demonstrate the strengths of Taylor-Johnson and Williams as performers. Taylor-Johnson plays Jamie as a capable, protective father, but one with obvious shortcomings and communication issues. He’s masculine, physically impressive, but complex in a way that Taylor-Johnson has not always been allowed in past roles; he’s not simply a cool, handsome guy, but a three-dimensional person.

However, Williams is the real revelation here, completely comfortable as the film’s lead and able to inhabit his character’s anxieties without resorting to the sort of tic-ridden whining that many young actors default to. He’s especially good playing against Jodie Comer as Isla, who has become one of the more dependable British actors of recent years.

You can see both Boyle’s and Garland’s storytelling sensibilities in the film, often working in harmony, occasionally providing divergent authorial approaches, which gives the film an intriguing artistic tension. For instance, Spike is truly a Boyle character, a well-meaning, clever, but sensitive lad who is resourceful but who is ultimately worth rooting for because of his kindness and affection for others. I’m reminded of Alex Etel in Boyle’s underrated 2004 film, Millions, or even Dev Patel in Slumdog Millionaire. Jamie is much more a Garland figure: a good, yet imperfect, man with a rigid code and an uncompromising way of approaching the world. The set-up is also extremely Garland, where Jamie and Spike (and later Isla) enter this unknown world of the mainland and have to navigate its grotesqueries and dangers. It’s reminiscent of Garland’s work as a director, especially Annihilation (2018), which delights in the bizarreness of Area X.

The mainland in 28 Years Later is not the apocalyptic waste of 28 Days Later or the urban warzone of 28 Weeks Later, but rather a fantastical creation in its own right. For one, it’s overgrown and gone completely wild. For instance, we see a massive herd of deer running through a pasture at one point, a sight you would never see in England today. But it’s also almost as strange as Area X in the rules of the Infected, who inhabit the mainland in some sort of quasi rabid pack structure. The biggest gambit in terms of worldbuilding is the fact that Boyle and Garland introduce new types of Infected. Now, there are slow and fat Infected known as Slow-Lows, which crawl in the dirt and feast mostly on worms. There are also massive, strong, and seemingly intelligent Infected known as Alphas, which act as pack leaders for the rest of the zombies.

The introduction of these new types adds novelty to the film, as it’s not just relying on fast zombies like the previous films, but also leads to endless questions among the plausibles about the world and how the Infected maintain their population despite the quarantine. Unlike in 28 Weeks Later, they do not die off from starvation; certain scenes suggest they have adapted to hunting prey, whether worms, fish, or deer. Boyle and Garland invite this curiosity, as it seems to be central to Spike’s quest onto the mainland and likely will be further explored in the subsequent two films.

Garland’s interest in worldbuilding and the almost supernatural elements of the creatures is perhaps his chief contribution, but this is still a Boyle-directed film, with a frenetic visual and editorial approach that harkens back to his innovations in the mid-1990s in films like Trainspotting. Once again working with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (who shot 28 Days Later), Boyle creates a disorienting visual effect that mimics Spike’s own emotional experience. He doesn’t shoot in pre-HD DV like he did in 28 Days Later, but he does shift between crisp anamorphic landscape shots, hazy, narrow-focus closeups, and grainy inserts—all astonishingly shot on a souped-up iPhone 15 Max rig.

The editing from Jon Harris is also chaotic, hyperactive, not quite as discordant as work from the early 2000s, but happy to jump between cuts at abandon, constantly destabilizing us. Some sequences will slow things down to allow us to witness the majesty of the landscape, such as a nighttime scene on the causeway where we see the Milky Way lit up above Jamie and Spike even in the midst of a chase. But other scenes will cut between events past and present to give a kind of eerie, totalizing vision of what happens in this new, wild world. For instance, at one point Jamie and Spike come across a deer head mounted in a tree, its spinal cord dangling beneath. As Jamie and Spike investigate it, Boyle and Harris cut to sporadic, red-light night vision shots of Infected ravaging the deer and an Alpha ripping the head off. It’s creepy, tense, but also plays to the constant presence of some deeper, malevolent spirit wherever Jamie and Spike go. The whole of Britain seems to be haunted in 28 Years Later. But what is it haunted with?

The music is also very Boyle. The score from progressive rap group Young Fathers works in poetic lyrics, sweeping orchestral movements, and Brian Eno-influenced ambience. The audio approach becomes a kind of pastiche of British sounds from the past hundred years, which plays into the film’s other chief interest aside from zombie horror: Britain itself.

28 Years Later is interested in the magic of the British Isles and the deep history of the land, going back to the pre-Roman era. It interrogates this later in the narrative as the film descends into folk horror, referencing works like The Wicker Man and even Ben Wheatley’s Kill List. But its interest in Britishness is present from the get-go. We get audio clips of British poems, such as Taylor Holmes’ chilling rendition of Rudyard Kipling’s “Boots” from 1915. We get quick clips of Laurence Olivier’s Henry V and archival clips from British of the early 20th century. The island community has a portrait of a young Queen Elizabeth on the wall and the English cross flag flying. We even, bizarrely, get a gang of characters sporting Jimmy Savile costumes. Unmentioned in the film is the fact that the island where they live is actually Lindisfarne, home to a key Celtic monastery from before the Viking invasions. With all these overwhelming British references, you’d have to wonder whether people located outside of the United Kingdom will appreciate the totality of “Britishness” in 28 Years Later. But considering that I’m only watching from a Commonwealth country and not Britain itself, I can confirm the approach makes 28 Years Later a rich text with a lot to unpack.

For something that could’ve easily been a cynical, pedestrian legacy sequel, 28 Years Later is refreshingly complex and bold. Like its characters, it refuses to take the easy route. The only thing holding it back from higher praise is its clear function as merely part one of a three part story. The ending is somewhat anticlimactic as it sets up 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, to come out 28 weeks from now. If the sequel matches this film’s inventiveness, it’s possible 28 Years Later plays even better in retrospect. But what’s clear right now is that it’s a creepy, engrossing, truly novel entry in a genre that has grown as mindless and predictable as the creatures at its centre. Perhaps, as it did in 2002, Boyle and Garland’s success will bring the seemingly dead genre back to life once again.

8 out of 10

28 Years Later (2025, UK/USA)

Directed by Danny Boyle; written by Alex Garland; starring Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jack O’Connell, Alfie Williams, Ralph Fiennes.

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