‘28 Years Later’ review: brilliantly bizarre sequel turns the franchise on its (decapitated) head

You probably saw it doing the rounds on social media during the pandemic: that haunting clip of Cillian Murphy, in his hospital scrubs, looking bewildered at an abandoned Westminster Bridge and the empty city that lay beyond. The iconic scene from 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle’s classic 2002 horror/sci-fi movie about an infection that turns unlucky victims into flesh-eaters (they’re not technically zombies, OK?), took on a different hue during the desolate days of lockdown, but it was always packed with meaning.

Arriving in the aftermath of 9/11, the film channelled anxiety about the frightening new world we found ourselves in. “You think they’re almighty, but suddenly cities felt fearful,” Boyle recently reflected in an interview with The Sunday Times.

Boyle eschewed the bigger budget ($15m as opposed to $8m) 2007 follow-up 28 Weeks Later, as did original writer Alex Garland. Both are back for this belated follow-up – the first of a mooted new trilogy – which was made for a brain-bursting $75m and reimagines the entire concept in a manner that is extravagantly bold, imaginative and brilliantly bizarre. There’s almost nothing like it; for a comparative movie that flips an existing franchise on its head after two instalments, you’d have to look at 1992’s Evil Dead sequel Army Of Darkness, which played a similar aesthetic for laughs.

After the events of the previous film, the virus has been beaten back from mainland Europe and contained to Britain (remember when the rest of the world called the UK “Plague Island” in the first year of COVID?) Some – ahem – 28 years later, the action opens on a self-contained north-eastern island of survivors that’s regressed to medieval times, with bows and arrows and folkloric tales of the infected mainland, which must occasionally be accessed via a causeway during heroic smash-and-grabs for supplies.

Silly Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) resolves to take his 12-year-old son, Spike (Alfie Williams), on a coming-of-age mission to said mainland – much to the disapproval of matriarch Isla (Jodie Comer), who’s all but bedbound with a mystery illness. Once they reach this strange land, it transpires that the infected have mutated into a triumvirate of horror: as well as the familiar running zombies – sorry, flesheaters – there are enormous, gelatinous deadies that flop around like decomposing Jelly Babies. Much more frightening are the super-charged Alphas, swaggering super-zombies who look down on those pesky arrows as if they’re mere toothpicks.

If it sounds like Boyle and Garland have been smoking some super-strength Cali weed in the writers’ room, you’ve heard nothing yet. Just wait until Ralph Fiennes is covered in iodine, philosophising about life and death and making modern art out of human remains.

While 28 Weeks Later explored post-7/7 paranoia, this post-Brexit successor seems to be as much about the insanity of isolationism as it is the bewildering madness of COVID. With an elegiac soundtrack courtesy of Young Fathers, it’s at turns funny, horrifying and even profound. The movie was filmed back-to-back with the first sequel in the new trilogy, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, which is due early next year; the existence of the third depends on their success. Get to the cinema and make sure it happens – we don’t care if you run, flop or swagger.