MOVIE REVIEW – Danny Boyle’s latest, 28 Years Later, returns to the post-apocalyptic landscape that first made him a genre trailblazer—this time with a mix of biting nostalgia, knowing self-parody, and the sort of sharp detours that only Boyle could dare. At Wednesday night’s press screening at Mamut II and a packed Etele Plaza premiere, audiences were confronted with a familiar but freshly ironic apocalypse: Boyle and his creative crew aren’t afraid to lean into all the old genre tricks, but they throw in just enough dark wit and bold pivots to shake up the formula. There’s comfort and fatigue in these tropes, sure—but with a gut-punching coming-of-age tale at its heart, Boyle proves the old beast still has teeth, even if it’s got a bit of gray in its fur.

If there’s a cinematic genre obsessed with the knife-edge between life and death, it’s the zombie movie. But few films have cut as deep as Danny Boyle’s iconic 28 Days Later, where the UK is slammed into lockdown to contain the “Rage” virus, transforming most of its citizens into sprinting, animalistic predators. For the rest of the world, Hell suddenly came with clear borders—a kind of apocalyptic comfort. Lucky them, right?

Blood, Sweat, and Statistics

Of course, that airtight quarantine didn’t last: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s misguided 28 Weeks Later cracked the walls back in 2007, but Boyle’s new chapter snaps the saga right back to its raw roots from the opening frames. It’s a powerful reminder why this post-9/11 landmark never left pop culture’s mind—laying bare just how fragile the veneer of civilization truly is. It’s not just the West’s self-consuming rage; it’s a brutal meditation on how survival instinct can be more dangerous than any outside threat. Those we love live on in memory; faceless casualties, half a world away, might as well never have existed. Or, to quote a notorious mass murderer: “One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.”

Zombie movies terrify because they turn the personal inside out—Boyle’s 28 Days Later might be the most harrowing of all, thanks to its infected who transform and attack with the speed of a nightmare. There’s no real escape; that’s the horror. What makes 28 Years Later unique is that it sprints straight at the same truth, but dares to hunt for redemption. It’s a strange, satisfying balance of nerve and heart, powered by Boyle and Alex Garland’s signature blend of atheistic philosophy and wild narrative risk. The message is simple: Denying death only makes life feel fake.

Holy Island: Sanctuary or Illusion?

This isn’t your typical haunted house—28 Years Later is more taut than terrifying. You get all the gory spectacle and savage attacks you’d expect from a studio horror, but the world’s moved on since the Rage virus tore across England, and pure panic isn’t as easy to conjure anymore. The infected still hurl themselves at the screen with wild abandon, and an opening set piece—where a roomful of children, eyes glued to Teletubbies, becomes a grotesque feast—lands with the queasy punch of the series’ darkest moments. Still, Boyle is savvy (and restless) enough to admit that in 2025, fast zombies don’t chill the spine like they once did. Even the prologue feels more like a well-rehearsed ritual than a genuine shock.

The focus then shifts to the cloistered community on Holy Island, still surviving nearly three decades after doomsday. This real-life Northumberland outpost (population: 180) is only accessible at low tide, and its residents have carved out their own rules and rhythms, cut off from the mainland and content to let the world rot. Patrol boats keep the quarantine air-tight; nobody escapes, but with no electricity or modern comforts, the price of isolation is its own strange luxury.

For twelve-year-old Spike, life is simple: be as tough as his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and find a way to help his ailing mother Isla (Jodie Comer). His first journey across the causeway is a rite of passage straight out of a post-apocalyptic YA novel—ritualized, anxious, and even peppered with vintage British war film clips, as if this story needs a reminder of the nation’s old imperial ghosts.

Shadows and Nightmares

But Spike’s journey into adulthood turns out to be deadlier than anyone expected. Alongside Jamie, he encounters bizarre new variants of the infected—bulky “Slow-Lows,” grotesquely endowed “Alphas,” and, of course, the classic, rag-clad sprinters. Yet it’s not the monsters that most impress Spike, but the wild, boundless world beyond the island: open fields, forests, and a perpetual fire tended by an unhinged ex-doctor so infamous that even Jamie steers clear. Out there, Spike dreams of discovering a cure for his mother’s mysterious headaches, nosebleeds, and confusion. Frustrated by his father’s resignation, and raised to believe that real men protect their own at any cost, Spike arms himself, sneaks his mother off the island, and sets off to find the mad doctor—hoping for a miracle.

In its second half, 28 Years Later leans even harder into the franchise’s roots: vulnerable survivors scrambling across a ravaged British countryside, desperate to dodge the ever-evolving infected. But what really ties the movie together isn’t just the action—it’s Anthony Dod Mantle’s dazzling, hyper-anamorphic iPhone cinematography, riffing on the original’s gritty Canon XL1 look, and masterfully juggling the ugliness of collapse with the promise of rebirth. The color palette is electric, but nature’s cold indifference lingers everywhere. Boyle revels in stylized zombie kill shots—cheap bullet-time flourishes that turn every arrow to the throat into its own gory set piece—even as the story hints that the infected might not be quite so mindless after all.

Where Does Humanity End?

If the scares don’t always land, Boyle and Garland more than make up for it with a weirder, more existential brand of suspense. Here, the monsters are more human than ever—the gap between “us” and “them” is a question of perspective, not DNA. I’ll admit, the early hints at infected “evolution” had me rolling my eyes (nothing’s more tired than a thinking zombie), but Garland’s script twists the idea in such bizarre and audacious ways that I found myself buying in anyway.

It helps that we see this crumbling world through Spike’s innocence. Boyle, a director with a knack for coaxing real performances from kids, gets a breakout turn from Alfie Williams: the boy is equal parts fearless survivor and terrified son, giving the movie its rawest, most honest moments.

Fates on the Edge of Ruin

Jodie Comer gets a rare gift of a role here: her Isla isn’t just a background presence, sweating and wandering; she’s given real emotional heft. While Isla’s dementia initially feels like a Hollywood cliché—she sometimes confuses her son with her long-dead father—the dynamic leads to some of the film’s richest, most affecting scenes, blurring the lines between the living and the dead. Spike’s awkwardness at being mistaken for a grown man gives these moments real weight. Even so, it’s clear that 28 Years Later is just the opening act: the story leaves plenty on the table for Nia DaCosta’s The Bone Temple sequel next year, but this first chapter offers up more than enough unforgettable moments of its own.

Growing up in the shadow of a zombie apocalypse, Spike is a product of a world where death is always somewhere else. A few lonely crosses mark the edge of the village, but loss happens “over there”—across the water, somewhere almost out of reach. Holy Island is haunted by its ghosts, but there hasn’t been a doctor in ages; when someone disappears on the mainland, nobody’s allowed to mount a rescue. It’s only as Spike faces his mother’s decline that he realizes death is present everywhere—and that saving her means facing the reality he’s spent his life avoiding.

The final act is contemplative and downbeat—a shift as jarring as the militaristic, violent turn of the first film’s last third. Ralph Fiennes elevates everything as Dr. Kelson, a character who channels equal parts Colonel Kurtz and Dumbledore (his delivery of “The magic of the placenta!” is an instant cult classic). This unexpectedly moving ending trades in Spike’s desperate flight from death for a meditation on how we only lose someone when we truly forget them.

Memento Mori – The Cost of Living

If we pretend nothing ever ends, life itself loses all meaning. The world may have left England to rot, but any society that can stomach turning a nation into a mass grave is already infected. Boyle, thankfully, doesn’t wallow in grand metaphysical sympathy for the infected—this is still a wild, unashamedly naked zombie film, with only as much empathy as the genre demands. Yet 28 Years Later masterfully leverages every trope of the form to remind us: the difference between tragedy and statistics is razor-thin. The magic of the placenta, indeed.

– Gergely Herpai “BadSector” –