28 Years Later: A terrifying vision of Britain turning in on itself
Few places in Britain scream zombie apocalypse less than the Northumbrian coast, which makes it the perfect setting for Danny Boyle 's new film. This transfixingly nasty, shrewdly postponed sequel to 2002's 28 Days Later finds a knot of survivors ensconced on the island of Lindisfarne where the otherwise endemic Rage virus has yet to reach.
The menfolk work with their hands, the children sing hymns at school, and in the evenings, bitter is swilled by the tankard, while an accordion leads the revellers in roaring song. This little heaven built in hell's despair is separated from the ghoul-infested mainland by a gated tidal causeway which only the untainted few are permitted to cross. You might say its inhabitants have taken back control – but then so has virus-free Europe, which has the entire UK under a militarily enforced lockdown of the damned.
The original 28 Days Later – written, like this one, with a beady sociological eye by Alex Garland – noted the civil unrest that had started to fester as the optimism of the early Blair years began to fade. This follow-up doesn't re-take the temperature of British society one generation on so much as vivisect its twitching remains.
Call it Disemb-owell and Pressburger: an unholy hybrid of A Canterbury Tale and Cannibal Holocaust which Boyle was perhaps uniquely placed to pull off, and which stands as his finest film since 2008's Slumdog Millionaire. It isn't 'about' Brexit or Covid or anything else so crudely specific: rather, it's a phantasmagorical vision of a deeply familiar, vulnerable, beautiful nation that has become intent on simultaneously turning in on and against itself.
Its plot centres on a 12-year-old lad called Spike (Alfie Williams, a real find) who illicitly leaves his island haven to search the mainland for a much-whispered-about doctor (Ralph Fiennes) who might be able to help his mother Isla (Jodie Comer) overcome an unknown disease.
Spike's father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a seasoned stalker of the infected, among whom muscular 'alphas' have begun to emerge. (Presumably because fabric rips and rots, one point of difference with the first film and its now canonically sidelined original successor, 2007's 28 Weeks Later, is that the zombies here are obviously nude; sometimes pendulously so.)
Early on in the film, Taylor-Johnson is hungry to induct his son into the hunting rite, and their first joint expedition proves as heart-in-throat for the audience as it does arrow-in-throat for most of their targets. The precise moments of impact are captured by cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle with a sickening, time-freezing jerk, as if the camera operator from The Matrix has just had his neck snapped. Mantle shot much of the film on (augmented) iPhone cameras, which give the regularly outrageous action a terrifyingly ordinary texture like Facebook photos from a walking holiday in Alnmouth.
Garland employs a strain of peculiarly British pulp humour – very 2000 AD, very Warhammer 40,000 – to undercut the ambient dread. And flashes of Arthurian fantasias and wartime newsreel footage (as well as a pointed double cameo for the now-felled Sycamore Gap tree) serve as regular nudges in the ribs as he and Boyle toy with the notion of a 21st century British national myth.
Perhaps more than any of the above, though, it's Fiennes's gently patrician, RP-accented doctor – whose bedside manner is impeccable even when stripped to the waist and slathered in iodine – which gives 28 Years Later its lingering, Kiplingian ache. A brief prologue and epilogue suggest that next January's sequel, titled The Bone Temple and directed by The Marvels' Nia DaCosta, will stir Scottish Presbyterianism into the mix. What British end of the world worth its salt would be without it?
15 cert, 115 mins. In cinemas from June 20
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