Plot Summary: Twelve-year-old Spike has grown up in a United Kingdom that has been quarantined and all but abandoned by the rest of the world. 28 years ago, the Rage Virus escaped from a British laboratory, leaving death, destruction, and hoards of the infected people in its wake. Small communities of uninfected survivors now exist on the overgrown landscape, barricaded from the threat of the infected. From a young age, the inhabitants of Spike’s island village are trained to kill the infected. We meet Spike as he kisses his ailing mother Isla goodbye and prepares to continue the coming-of-age tradition of leaving the village and crossing the landbridge (which only appears at lowtide) into the mainland for his first kill. After a harrowing initiation and panicked return to the island village, Spike witnesses his father Jamie exaggerating the success of the  journey with grandiose tales told to their adoring and tightly knit community. Spike begins to mistrust his father’s judgement, leading him to question everything that his father has told him about their world, his mother’s mysterious illness, and the large fire he saw on the horizon during his initiation.

Runtime: 115 minutes

Director: Danny Boyle

Writers: Alex Garland

• Alfie Williams as Spike
• Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Jamie
• Jodie Comer as Isla
• Ralph Fiennes as Dr. Ian Kelson
• Jack O’Connell as Sir Jimmy Crystal 

Review by: Lauren

28 Years Later reunites the dream team of two prominent English filmmakers, director Danny Boyle and writer-director Alex Garland. The duo’s classic 2002 film 28 Days Later has become cemented in the horror canon, for its new (as of 2002) and gritty take on the zombie genre. The film’s visual language and texture from the partial use of camcorders and the disorienting display of Jim’s (Cillian Murphy) survival journey through Great Britain, uncannily reflected the chaos and fear in the post-9/11 world (the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center occurred during filming). 28 Weeks Later, the 2007 sequel, also feels relevant to the War on Terror era in which it was created, with its use of military imagery to convey force, control, and surveillance. 28 Years Later continues the series’ tradition of pulling themes from real world occurrences, but deftly extrapolates on those themes with expanded world-building, poking and prodding at the “what-ifs” and our assumptions about what makes us human. 

Both Boyle and Garland are known for very British films with heavy themes and big swings. They haven’t always been successful in the past, but 28 Years Later does not disappoint. A thrilling score by Scottish band Young Fathers propels sweeping pastoral shots of the overgrown British countryside as well as frightening swarms of the Infected chasing our protagonists over rolling hills. The visual language of the film is effectively disorienting, with jarring angles and cuts to the Infected bathed in infrared light. Clips of British warfare throughout history are spliced with images of Rage Virus survivors drawing their arrows from behind their village’s barricade walls, narrated by a recitation of the 1903 poem, “Boots” by English writer and herald of empire, Rudyard Kipling. 

Though the visuals are stunning in and of themselves, they ultimately support the true star of the film: death. Death lingers over every word, every action, and every scene. Garland’s writing here is a tender meditation on this final punctuation upon each creature’s time on Earth. In 28 Years Later, we see the way that non-infected humans internalize and metabolize the death that constantly surrounds them. Most fear it, as it is the great unknown, after all. But the film shows how the extraordinary circumstances have pushed that fear to a cult-like extreme. Spike’s island village (as well as mainland inhabitants) have fought endlessly to create a system that ensures their survival, but in the process they have started to fixate and almost worship death, through the sadistic killing of the Infected for pleasure and even rites of passage. In the third act we find that there is another way to approach death: an embrace. Memento mori, a character (who’s name I will hide for spoiler purposes) says, “remember you must die.” A cathedral-like construction of skulls and bones remind us that even viewers can not escape this fate and that we are all very similar underneath it all (metaphorically and literally). 

Images Courtesy of IMDB