★★★★☆
MINOR PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD
Britain is in dire straits. In the wake of a long economic downturn—defined by the sale of public assets and emblematized by a dreadfully morose political class—Matteo Tiratelli and Ali Helwith recently argued that the future of Charles III’s Kingdom is a “state of stagnation.” Of course, the U.K. is merely stagnant in the economic sense. Just as with all the earth’s other nations, supranational unions, military alliances, and apartheid states, the British are travelling with increasing velocity towards that ultimate, spectral annihilation of planet and global society which the winners of the twentieth century took care to plan for us. The Anthropocene will march onwards against nature until the stagnant, the immobile, is shocked into action. If their new film 28 Years Later is any suggestion, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland can’t wait.
In the two decades since the release of the hyper-aggressive, hyper-inexpensive 28 Days Later, only Marc Forster’s World War Z has successfully appropriated writer Garland’s single most revelatory narrative decision (what if zombies were as fast as the fucking dogs from Resident Evil), and even that was in the form of reactionary, Obama-era ideological containment. Beyond Brad Pitt’s exploits, The Walking Dead and The Last of Us have held a long and unimpressive rule over Western zombie narratives leading up to the release of 28 Years Later this June. Sound the church bells, because those dastardly Yanks will hog the sweet supply no longer! Boyle and Garland are bringing us back to the old country—the crown’s country, damn it. Tearing through the Scottish Highlands, Boyle is at his most prepared to navigate the ‘political,’ a fact he asserted in a recent interview with IGN:
“We turned back and looked at ourselves and we thought … it was very much like an England [type] film…So we kind of narrowed it down. We did the opposite of what you’d expect and it was because we had a lot to think about. And certainly in terms of Britain, not uniquely, but certainly in terms of Brexit, it’s unique. There’s a couple of things that have happened to us in the intervening period since the first film that you thought, ‘Well, this is the opportunity to look at that.’
Make no mistake: 28 Years Later—like most zombie narratives—is post-apocalyptic, but never post-anthropogenic. Boyle and Garland take great pains to stress that the ‘monsters’ roaming Britain are just as human as you or I, and this humanistic sentiment is reinforced by the omnipresence of death, just as it was in 28 Days Later, and just as it remains today in our own apocalypse—always with the caveat that death must inevitably result in something new. To this end, Ralph Fiennes delivers the only outstanding performance in the film, assuming a delicious turn as the guardian of enormous memento mori. But Fiennes’ character represents the story of a battle, not the fight itself. The survivors in Boyle’s film need to get their hands dirty before they can truly breathe, and such is the cost of breaking stagnation.
Early in the film, Alfie Williams’ character refuses the suggestion that he turn back home, away from the zombie-ridden Scottish mainland, for fear of being called ‘soft.’ This scene is as much a warning to the viewer as it is a point of exposition: From the moment the blood begins to spill, Boyle wreaks havoc with his myriad iPhone rigs, which whip and twist the viewer through diegetic space like a rabid animal. At one point, an arrow through the neck is displayed in one hundred and eighty degrees, taking the audience on an intimate tour of human viscera. These techniques, in combination with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle’s mastery of the widescreen aspect ratio, display a command of a new ‘post-cinematic’ form which “intimate[s] the ‘unhomely,’ ‘inhospitable’ world of the Anthropocene without being thematically invested in environmental issues.”¹ With increasing frequency and scope, the wartime mutilation of those deemed enemies of the West is hidden from us in the media, and thus Boyle’s incorporation of such intimate, unflinching cinematic maneuvers becomes inspiring for its militant empathy. ‘Don’t look away,’ Boyle’s camera appears to say. ‘You’re already culpable.’
And we should be overjoyed that Garland was on his best behaviour as a writer here. In the span of four years, the man wrote and directed three all-time shitters in Men (2022), Civil War (2024), and Warfare (2025). But with 28 Years Later, Garland has dedicated himself to the death drive, and even his risible attempts at familial drama are made more clear sighted as a result: Quietly, 28 Years Later is also a film about the untenable nature and eventual dissolution of the modern family unit.
One hopes that Boyle and Garland’s newest collaboration signals the return of zombie narratives which unsettle the distance between fictional apocalypses and those which are all too real, though the film’s denouement signals a change of direction towards Zombieland–style overindulgence that hurts my belief in the upcoming sequels. Only time will tell if 28 Years Later ages as gracefully as Boyle’s original, but we can rest assured that death of the anthropogenic, planetary kind will still be lurking. The question is what we’ll make of it.
¹ Vermeulen, pp.78-79. Literature and the Anthropocene. Routledge, Taylor & Francis group, 2020.