28 Years Later 5 stars☆☆☆☆☆

28 years after the Rage virus decimated Britain, a young boy ventures onto the mainland to save his sick mother

Unsurprisingly in Britain, a zombie apocalypse doesn’t even put a dent in our class system. Rather, the Infected seem to have embraced it: a few alpha leaders, tall, lean and strong, surrounded by upright minions, and an underclass of squidgy floor crawlers. One wants to shout unionise! at the floor crawlers, but I’d probably get my spine ripped out.

28 years on from the initial infection Britain is a quarantined hellhole, its waters patrolled by NATO boats. The rest of the world carries on; ’twas ever thus, it’s just not usually happening to “us”.

28 Jameses Later – sorry, 28 Years Later – is one part sheer terror, one part gorgeousness, and one part fields, bookended with pop culture: the Teletubbies, and, er, Jimmy Savile. The performances are superb, particularly Alfie Williams as the young hero. No scene is wasted; everything drips with meaning.

12 year old Spike (Williams), his dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and mum Isla (Jodie Comer) live on a fortified tidal island off the North East coast. It’s Lindisfarne, or Holy Island, settled by Saint Aidan in 634 as a base from which to go out and spread the Christian gospels, and then raided by Vikings a century and a half later. Now, three decades on from the outbreak, history warps and twists. The newly arrived Alphas, huge and almost unstoppable, mimic the raiders of the past; though the islanders themselves have retreated and look outwards with understandable suspicion, unlike the proselytising holy men from Lindisfarne’s earliest days.

The warped repetitions of history is a theme in director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland’s magnificent film, how myths grow and patriotic reworkings change history itself, from Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (made to boost troops’ morale during WW2) to early aughts pop culture. The only people who honour the past truthfully are Isla, recounting tales of her childhood through her fever dreams, and Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) who proclaims the humanity of quite literally every body he meets. She is dying; he is assumed to be mad.

Spike is crossing the causeway with his dad, a rite of passage for teens to make their first kill, archery being the essential skill in this post apocalyptic nation. Younger than most who’ve made the trip, he’s leaving behind Isla, whose moments of lucidity are becoming fewer. Village elders warn there can be no rescue.

On the mainland there’s a lot of traipsing through fields. In between they find a twisting infected hanging upside down with JIMMY carved into his torso, shoot blobby worm-eating crawlers, and are chased by the local Alpha bully. As a day out it brought to mind Mark Twain’s apocryphal description of golf as a good walk spoiled, though now a hole-in-one is an arrow straight through the heart.

They make it back across the causeway, just, in a hideously tense and breathtakingly beautiful sequence, with young Spike shouting that he can’t carry on while the ink-blue sea meets a sky glowing with northern lights. It finishes with the village archers firing their arrows in a perfect high curve in an attempt to take down the Alpha chasing them, Lindisfarne’s own Agincourt.

The UK’s tidal islands, only accessible from the mainland at low tide, are a gift for folk horror directors whether indie or mainstream; a haven from disaster or, if the tide traps you with your demons, a prison (think The Woman In Black). 

28 Years Later has been explained as partly a metaphor for BREXIT: cut off from mainland Europe, left with a man-made mess, chunks of our populace are in retreat from the “other” while harking back to a time that never existed, created from half-remembered Hovis adverts and reruns of All Creatures Great And Small.

The film’s parallels are in-your-face with its fortified island, the St George flag fluttering above the closed gates, but there’s so much more going on, as this is a movie stuffed with allusion and illusion. 

It’s a coming-of-age tale though not in the way Spike or his dad is expecting. That first trip teaches Spike that hubris for one more kill could actually kill you; and, when they finally make it back, that even recent history can be retold to make unlikely heroes out of scared children. The final nail in the coffin is watching his dad go off with another woman while Isla sleeps fitfully at home.

Spike’s next journey is indeed the making of him though, as he takes Isla to the mainland to visit “mad” Dr Kelson, in the hope he is still sane enough to cure her. Along the way they meet Erik (Edvin Ryding), a Swedish sailor and the only survivor of his sunk NATO boat. Erik dares to name the Z word, so this is a universe that knows a zombie when it sees one. (I rather hoped, on seeing the Queen’s portrait in the village hall, that Liz had taken time out in the early years of the infection to read World War Z, and spent her last days pumping oil from under Windsor Castle.)

There are a (very) few jokes: Spike’s reaction to a photo of Erik’s lip-plumped fiancée is a hoot, though it also reminds us the UK has seen nothing of the social media age, and indeed our history simply stopped when that first chimp was freed (something that feeds into the ending).

The compassionate, scientific and sane Dr Kelson cannot cure Isla but he can save them both, from his “memento mori” of bleached bones reaching to the sky that honours the dead while reminding the living that they too must die.

There are callbacks to the first film (see: churches) but 28 Days Later ended hopefully: Jim, Selena and Hannah, a little family cheerily awaiting rescue. Once sequels entered the mix that was cast aside but, in a spirit of retconning, maybe we should see it as a comment on happy endings that can’t be trusted, what we’d like to be true versus reality. (Alternate endings had Jim dying from his wounds but these played badly with preview audiences, which fits perfectly with 28 Years Later‘s theme of reworking history into that which makes us most comfortable.)

The ending to 28 Years Later is dramatically different from the calm but devastating scenes between Spike, Isla and Dr Kelson, but this final sharp tonal shift (setting up a conflict within Spike between how Kelson and the Jimmys live their truth) works because everything before has led us here. Boyle has threaded his movie with patriotic old movie footage, history, poetry, the Teletubbies. Finally we get to the Jimmys, bleach-blond, tracksuited ninjas dripping with gold jewellery and based on the TV presenter and DJ Jimmy Savile, who was found after his death to have been a prolific sexual abuser. The ending makes sense because the Jimmys are not just the counterpoint to the compassionate, honourable Dr Kelson, but also the embodiment of what happens when you look back at history through a smeared lens.

Besides, Britain itself is an anachronism, its island status leaving it off kilter and slightly at odds with the rest of the world. It creates the best and worst of everything, so the initially strange jigsaw pieces that make up 28 Years Later seem entirely fitting.

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Abandonment, isolation and memory in 28 Years Later, plus what comes next

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Watch the trailer for 28 Years Later: