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PORTSIDE CULTURE

28 YEARS LATER AND THE SOCIAL LIFE OF CATASTROPHE  
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Eileen Jones
June 25, 2025
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ The latest installment of the 28 Days Later franchise returns with
more than zombies — it explores the strange new norms that follow
collapse. It’s a vision of survival horror that focuses not just on
the infected but on the ways humanity adapts. _

Alfie Williams, Jodie Comer, and Ralph Fiennes star in 28 Years
Later. , (Sony Pictures)

 

There’s a harrowing prologue to _28 Years Later_ that immediately
alerts the audience to the film’s deliberately disorienting
narrative and style. It doesn’t pay off until the final, brief scene
— and even then only works if you’ve been tracking the
significance of a cross necklace that passes from the hands of a dying
Anglican priest to a traumatized blonde boy, his son, who reappears at
the end as a very peculiar blonde man.

What happened to make the boy grow up to be such a strange fellow?
Well, living through a zombie apocalypse does all sorts of things to
people.

And yeah, I know — they’re not technically zombies, as director
Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland keep insisting in
interviews. If you recall the highly influential first apocalyptic
horror film in the series created by Boyle and Garland, _28 Days
Later_ (2002) — and who among us does not? — you know they’re
the “infected,” carriers of the “rage virus” that kicked off a
catastrophic modern pandemic across the United Kingdom, leaving few
survivors.

The prologue puts the film’s focus on children growing up in a time
of horror and how they’re warped by their parents within the
confines of small survivor communities. As in _28 Days Later,_ the
film critiques a disastrously patriarchal legacy stoked by disaster
and collapse of civilization — retrograde masculinity obsessed with
violent control, procreation, and the subjugation of women, with crude
militarism running alongside a resurgent warrior culture.

Among the Alphas

The survivors live mostly on rural, isolated Holy Island, which has
regressed to a preindustrial, agrarian state. Needless to say,
there’s not a cell phone in sight — just people living in the
moment. The island is the only inhabited place in England that remains
outside the vigilantly guarded quarantine keeping the world safe from
the victims of the “rage virus” that’s overrun the mainland. A
causeway that runs between them is only available for use during low
tide. And obviously, anyone who ventures onto the mainland and gets
infected isn’t allowed back through the island’s stockade gate.

After the grisly prologue, which only the boy with a cross necklace
survives, the main narrative begins with an entirely different,
dark-haired boy named Spike (Alfie Williams), whose story opens with
his trial of manhood. At age twelve, armed only with the bow and
arrows that are his community’s main weapons, he’s taken to the
mainland by his father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), to make his
“first kill.” The challenge of this task runs a wide gamut from
easy to nearly impossible, because the infected — who are the
hunters’ prey — have evolved into distinct subspecies.

There are blubbery abject creatures that live on worms and resemble
them in their slow wriggling crawl along the ground. There are the
frothing, twitching, shrieking, red-eyed “fast zombies” from the
first two films, now hunting in packs. And there are the “Alphas”:
giant, muscular figures of dread, Goliaths looming up on the horizon
line in beautifully scary shots that have a mythic power. In them, the
virus has acted like a combination of growth hormones and steroids.
Arrows merely enrage them, and it generally takes a village to bring
them down.

When Spike hesitates to kill one of the infected — found tied and
hung upside-down for the purposes of torture by unknown mainland
survivors — Jamie urges him on, saying, “The more you kill, the
easier it gets.”

Blood and Soil

The combination of religiosity and kill-happy fervor that defines
rural Holy Island society puts the film in folk-horror territory, with
the added creepiness of intense Anglophile nostalgia. The whole
community shows up to celebrate Spike’s “first kill” with a
booze-up under a faded 1950s photo of Queen Elizabeth II. Over the
rustic settlement, the flag of St George flies proudly — a symbol
adopted during the Crusades by the English “Christian soldiers”
trying to take the Holy Land over the piled-up dead bodies of Muslims
and Jews.

Lest you miss these unsubtle elements, Boyle edits in montages drawn
from various chapters of English history: documentary footage of WWI
soldiers on the march, a chilling 1915 recitation of Rudyard
Kipling’s “Boots,” and scenes from Laurence Olivier’s
adaptation of Shakespeare’s _Henry V_ in which archers raise their
bows. Their gestures reflect the arrows shot by Holy Island’s
guards.

Among those marginalized by Holy Island culture is Spike’s beloved
mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), who’s bedridden with an undiagnosed
illness that is both physically and mentally debilitating. She
protests in vain against Spike’s trial of manhood on the mainland,
but her condition is so dire she sinks into confusion almost before
she’s finished cursing Jamie for his irresponsibility.

No doctors have survived to treat the inhabitants of the island, and
Jamie tends to Isla with a weary reluctance that suggests he’s given
up on her recovery. After the trial alienates Spike from his father,
the boy develops an obsession with saving his mother by taking her to
the mainland, where a doctor is rumored to live among the infected.

The second trip to the mainland — bringing Spike and Isla into the
strange haven created by Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) — is
completely different than the first. The overwhelming presence of
death, as disturbing as it is, gives rise to a reverence for life.
When you first see Dr Kelson’s sky-high sculpture made out of human
skulls, you’re primed to experience a ghastly encounter with a
figure like Kurtz in _Heart of Darkness_. So it’s quite a surprise
when the narrative turns in a different direction — though
Fiennes’s peculiar high-fluting laugh at the joy of having
noninfected visitors lets you know he’s moved into his own form of
high-functioning madness.

28 Years Later . . . Again

Tribute must be paid to the film for its riveting adoration of nature,
which is resplendent on the mainland in the absence of rapacious human
exploitation. Shooting mainly on iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max — with
supplementary drones and film cameras — in Northumberland near the
Scottish border, _28 Years Later_ celebrates the grand sweep of
fields and forests, the running deer, the vast and glorious clear sky.

The film was partly inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic and the
isolationist bent in English politics that led to Brexit, layering in
additional thematic resonances. In short, there’s a lot going on
in _28 Years Later._ I didn’t mind the scattershot montages or the
careening narrative because at least I was spared the deadening
effects of being able to guess everything that was going to happen in
advance. Its loose, episodic structure seems fitting for a world where
humanity’s relentless adaptability is on full display — as both
the infected and uninfected evolve in bizarre ways to meet bizarre
conditions.

In general, there’s quite a split in response to _28 Years
Later_ that probably has a lot to do with its lack of predictable
“fan service”: very high scores from the critics but pretty low
scores from the general public.

The abrupt way the film ends, right after introducing a whole new
narrative swerve with a fresh cast of characters, displeased a lot of
viewers. It signals clearly that a sequel is imminent. Garland has
already written the planned trilogy. The second instalment,
called _28 Years Later: The Bone Temple,_ will be directed by Nia
DaCosta (_The Marvels, Candyman_) — in order to “break up the
boys’ club” as Boyle put it
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planned third film will be directed by Boyle again, with Cillian
Murphy returning to star — if the funding comes through.

Which I hope it does. I like the scope and tension and wilder
inventions of this film and want to see how the overall narrative arc
plays out. I’m one of the few who appreciated the ending — its
sudden jump into dark humor and action-oriented, exuberant craziness.
It seemed like it was about time for that version of the human
response to utter catastrophe to burst forth. And I feel that way not
just about the sequels to _28 Years Later _but about our situation
in the United States as well.

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Contributors

Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of
the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.

 

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* 28 years later
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* zombies
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* pandemics
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* patriarchy
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* horror film
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