RATING
Director(s): Danny Boyle
Country: United States
Author: Alex Garland
Actor(s): Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor Johnson, Ralph Fiennes
Written by Tom Augustine
There was no better trailer for 28 Days Later, the heart-stopping, radical zombie horror of the early 2000s, than the breathless accounts of fear those who watched it passed on to the uninitiated. I was about ten when it came out, and my uncle Glenn, a Londoner, attested to the fear it cultivated in apocalyptic terms. As a timid kid, I foreswore ever watching horror films, and 28 Days Later specifically, averting my eyes from its intimidating poster whenever I was browsing the local video store. All I knew of it were glimpses and whispers — that iconic image of frail, screaming Cillian Murphy fleeing a man engulfed in flames; the shots of a barren, empty London; reports of a scene in a church that caused viewers to cry in terror. I finally broke the seal and watched 28 Days Later only recently. In the years since, imitative works influenced by the original have only grown in size and scope, the brainchild of punk auteur Danny Boyle and then-nascent writer Alex Garland going on to infect and spread through the zombie subgenre like wildfire. Before I watched 28 Days Later, I had already seen its DNA in Train to Busan, World War Z, The Last of Us, and so on. Running zombies were no longer the new thing, they were the stock standard. Perhaps that’s why I found myself enjoying 28 Days Later, with its twitchy, abrasive digital approach to zombie lore, but was surprised to find I was not terrified by it (I was, however, ably freaked out by sequences in its sequel, the underrated 28 Weeks Later). I had a similar experience with 28 Years Later, where the object of horror that I built in my head could never be adequately captured by the product itself. In this case, the culprit was not word-of-mouth but the two ingenious trailers for the new film, artworks unto themselves, which synthesised the general feeling of escalating doom that seems to swirl all about us in this current moment with simple, chilling taglines: “What will humanity become?”, and “How much time do we have left?”
No, 28 Years Later is not the sustained nightmare that the trailers suggested — it is plenty scary, but it’s also kaleidoscopic, political, and enormously heartfelt. The longer I sit with it, the more I find myself enamoured with it — it’s a film of daring images, one that wholly embraces a hardscrabble, handmade existence that stands apart from the lacquered, social media-ready horror aesthetics en vogue in the culture. It represents a return to form for both of its key creatives, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland — for Boyle, it is a reminder of his capabilities as a unique visionary in British cinema; for writer Garland, arguably a creative of higher significance than the film’s director at this stage in his career, it is perhaps his finest ever script, a much-needed salve after the line-toeing directorial failures of Men, Civil War and Warfare. It is a film that sets its sights on Britain, in intense conversation with the nation it has become in the years since the original film, and the result is some of the most withering and cutting work either creative has yet produced. But it is also, in its third act, a film that defies expectation by wandering into macabre existentialism, striking a perfect blend between Boyle’s open-hearted earnestness and Garland’s capacity to navel-gaze. That the pair prove that they are up to reinvigorating a subgenre they’d already reinvigorated is simply icing on the cake.
28 Years Later functions as a coming of age story, with its acts loosely segmented into the presence of parental figures of which the twelve year old Spike (a magnificent Alfie Allen) is currently within the orbit. Spike lives on Lindisfarne, the one-time haunt of Saint Cuthbert also known as Holy Island (one with an extensive, violent history, surely in the minds of the creators in choosing the location), a spit of land accessible by only one road, which appears and disappears at the whims of the tide. The community that has established itself there is heavily fortified and isolationist, with ample shades of Wicker Man-esque folklore sinisterness and the faintest suggestions of inbreeding. As 28 Years begins, Spike is about to go on his first expedition beyond the walls of the community with his father, the rough-hewn but well-meaning Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson); a rite of passage for the young-folk of the town that functions as a kind of rumspringa, a reminder of the preciousness of the community and the need to protect it. Spike, a timid lad not fond of killing, is less concerned for his own safety than he is to leave his mother behind, the ailing Isla (Jodie Comer), suffering from a mysterious condition that a lack of medical specialists on-island are unable to treat. That initial, traumatic outing does not have the intended effect on Spike, however, who learns of a doctor off-island named Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), a reported madman, prompting Spike to escape with his mother in tow, seeking a cure. Father, then mother, then doctor (with plenty of other notable personalities cropping up throughout): Spike is our viewpoint into the world, but come film’s end, his is at last the perspective that moves to the forefront.
As they did over two decades ago with the raw, primal 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland attempt a revitalisation of the now-tired zombie genre, which has in the intervening years since has frequently been remodeled in their image. The result is a daring, bracing mosaic of ideas, a twisted and angular beast wholly disinterested in the horror trends of recent years.
This segmenting paves the way for a story that morphs wilfully as it proceeds — its first segment a fairly traditional zombie survival story, before moving into something dreamier, almost fairy-tale, in its later acts. Boyle and Garland, clearly aware of the extensiveness of zombie lore around them at this point, lean on the most effective weapons in their arsenal, namely Boyle’s hallucinatory, frantic direction and the most interesting element established by previous iterations of the series — that only Britain is in the throes of a zombie apocalypse, with the rest of the world proceeding as normal around them. The Britain of 28 Years Later is thus frozen in space, a living time capsule to an era before smart phones, the proliferation of internet culture, or anything else that defines our current world. It also allows Garland to riff on Brexit’s impacts with an astuteness that was sorely lacking in Civil War and Warfare, which seemed eager to trip over themselves in asserting their apoliticism. As the world continues its onward march, the Britain of 28 Years Later recedes into tribalism and tradition — try to spot the parallel. The hallmarks of Rule Britannia remain: pronounced images of Queen Elizabeth, wartime propaganda, and medieval archers crop up amidst flashes of ghoulish zombies rendered red and demonic by infrared camera imaging. Theirs is an exquisite pairing, one that has paid dividends in the past and does here again — the bluntness of Garland’s writing is filtered through the erraticism of Boyle, who seems re-engaged after the howling failure of his Beatles fantasy Yesterday, itself a shameless piece of British fanboyism. The messy, cobbled-together feeling of the edit, which seems to follow the director’s subconscious fancies, generates an uncanny mood — sometimes an almost unbearable feeling of unease, other times a cosmic dizziness, as when Spike and Jamie flee a charging ‘Alpha’ (a zombie that’s evolved to lead the others, and, it is suggested, is semi-conscious) beneath a whirling array of stars.
This is all ably assisted by remarkable camerawork from legendary cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle — much as 28 Days Later immediately signposted its era by using commercial-grade handicams, lending the film a verité-style immediacy that felt genuinely docu-real, so too does 28 Years Later function as a stocktake of the visual tendencies of this era. The film is — famously — shot on iPhones, using 3D-printed rigs that allow for movement and imagery that is entirely new to blockbuster cinema. Unlike other iPhone-shot films that seem desperate to be compared to cinema-grade film cameras (namely Steven Soderbergh’s dalliances in the format), it’s also wilfully janky in places — shots judder in their movement, or ratchet from one side of the action to the other at breakneck speed. The warping that one gets with an iPhone shot that has attempted to stabilize is present in several sequences. By leaning into this aesthetic, letting the seams show, Boyle and Dod Mantle add to the uncanny, raw intensity, and in doing so provide a schematic for a type of large-scale filmmaking defined by its handmade properties, not by how it hobbles itself striving for machine-like perfection. One wonders how much more emotion or gravitas Boyle’s British contemporaries Christopher Nolan and Edgar Wright might have if they fetishised their well-oiled monuments of industry a little less. In its best moments, such camerawork adds to an electrifying sense of unpredictability — up to and including a final sequence that initially reads as jarring and out-of-place, before we begin to reckon with what it might be trying to tell us about British society.
What is surely 28 Years Later’s most rewarding aspect, though, is its emotional landscape. Everything within the film is tooled toward exploring what is handed down from an older generation to a younger — familial bonds, the importance of community, and especially how we contend with death, which naturally looms over the entire operation. Even the film’s treatment of its undead, through which Garland takes unprecedented narrative swings in the later acts of the film, foregrounds these questions. There’s no shortage of brilliant performances in 28 Years Later: Taylor-Johnson trades in years in the Hollywood meat-grinder for what is surely his finest performance, layering in vulnerability and hyper-masculine pigheadedness by the bucketful. Allen, as mentioned, is more than up to the task of shouldering the film’s many thematic inquiries, a child star whose presence is boosted by a lack of preening or over-rehearsedness. Fiennes, in a brief but welcome turn, reminds us of his capacity for reassuring warmth, even as he surrounds himself with death in visuals best left to the viewing. Comer, meanwhile, is the beating heart of the film’s very serious inquiry into, as Kelson puts it, the ‘many kinds of death, some better than others’. Those, like me, who have lost someone to the illness Comer’s Isla is contending with will likely identify it very quickly. The loss, for me, is recent and still one that I’m grappling with daily. Comer’s very fine performance instantly reminded me of the person I’ve lost. With that context colouring my viewing, I found the way that particular story thread resolved itself quite devastating. In its unnerving sincerity and the way, like anything emotionally true, it shoulders up against goofiness and pushes through to transcendence, 28 Years Later finally makes itself a monument to the spirituality inherent in that Latin phrase, repeated throughout the film: memento mori, remember you must die.
28 Years Later is in cinemas now.