The UK is a wasteland in Danny Boyle’s new film. Towns lie in ruins, trains rot on the rails and the EU has severed all ties with the place. Some residents are stuck in the past and congregate under the tattered flag of St George. The others flail shirtless through the open countryside, raging about nothing, occasionally stopping to eat worms. You wouldn’t want to live in the land that Boyle and the writer Alex Garland show us. Teasingly, on some level, the film suggests that we do.
Boyle and Garland first prowled zombie Britain with their 2002 hit 28 Days Later. It was an electrifying piece of speculative fiction, a guerrilla-style thriller about an unimaginable world. Since then we’ve had Brexit and Covid, and the looming threat of martial law in the US … The story’s extravagant flights of fancy don’t feel so far-fetched any more. “Yes, of course real world events were a big influence this time around,” Boyle says, sipping tea in the calm of a central London hotel. “Brexit is a transparency that passes over this film, without a doubt. But the big resonance of the original film was the way it showed how British cities could suddenly empty out overnight. And after Covid, those scenes now feel like a proving ground.” Where Cillian Murphy first walked, the rest of us would soon follow.
Tense and gory, 28 Years Later is a fabulous horror epic. I would hesitate to call it a sequel, exactly: it’s more a reboot or a renovation; a fresh build over an existing property. Newcomer Alfie Williams plays 12-year-old Spike, who defies his parents (Jodie Comer and Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and flees the sanctuary of Holy Island for an adventure on the infected mainland. Along the way, he tangles with berserker zombies and smirking psycho-killers, and encounters Ralph Fiennes’s enigmatic, orange-skinned Dr Kelson, reputedly a former GP from Whitley Bay. All of which makes for a jolting, engrossing journey; a film that freewheels through a gone-to-seed northern England before crashing headlong into the closing credits with many of its key questions still unanswered.
