Danny Boyle Goes Medieval in Scary, Strange 28 Years Later

In the years following 2002’s indie horror hit 28 Days Later, the bold Scottish director Danny Boyle shifted into something like the mainstream, winning an Oscar for 2008’s feel-good modern epic Slumdog Millionaire and making films about Steve Jobs and (sort of) the Beatles. It’s a pleasure, then, to see him back in the grittier climes of a zombie apocalypse in his new film, 28 Years Later (in theaters June 20). Grim and strange, 28 Years Later finds Boyle once again following the irregular rhythms of his brain.

28 Years Later reunites Boyle with 28 Days Later screenwriter Alex Garland, who has himself been on a curious filmmaking journey over the last few decades. Together they’ve made a film that tips the franchise (there was a sequel, 28 Weeks Later, in 2007) into the surreal and the metaphysical, an alarming depiction of a civilization’s wary survival.

Alfie Williams plays Spike, a 12-year-old boy who’s grown up on an island largely sheltered from the rage-infected cannibals who ravaged most of the isle of Britain three decades prior. His community is merry and self-sufficient, with a brave few occasionally venturing to the mainland for timber and other supplies via a narrow causeway. Toughness is prized among these hardscrabble people, and Spike is eager to prove his mettle by traveling with his father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), to a vast and perilous landscape he’s only imagined. There he will make his first kill of an infected, a bar mitzvah by blood.

To highlight the atavistic quality of this tradition, Boyle intercuts scenes of Spike and Jamie embarking on their quest with footage from old movies set in medieval times. Arrows are loosed into the sky just as Spike trains with his own bow; men march toward battle as father and son make their way into the dangerous unknown. At another point in the film, Boyle makes direct allusion to perhaps the most famous shot from Ingmar Bergman’s dark ages fantasy The Seventh Seal, men silhouetted in a line as they walk the crest of a hill. A new Black Death has befallen Britain, and all the old ways have come burbling back up through the mud.

The film reaches even further back into history: as Spike and Jamie trek further inland, they encounter sacrificial tableaux deep in the woods, evidence of ominous ritual. Perhaps some mad, warped version of paganism has reclaimed the land. Modernity can still be glimpsed on the horizon in the form of French warships, patrolling the seas to maintain Britain’s quarantine. And just as Spike’s isolated people appear to have regressed, others are maybe evolving. The infected display some habit of social organization, a hoary trope in zombie movies that is, frankly, never my favorite plot development. But Boyle and Garland at least present it in an interesting way, half horrific and half comedic. Brutal and wily as at least one infected has become, he’s also a little funny.

The film takes other big swings, ones involving Spike’s ailing mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), and a mysterious loner played by Ralph Fiennes. Three quarters of the way through, 28 Years Later slows the horror to become a rumination on death’s inevitability and life’s carrying on even in the grips of calamity. It’s poignant in an odd way, positioned as it is in what is ostensibly a horror film. Really, Boyle’s film is more post-apocalyptic anthropology than anything else, an alluring peer into a near future in which humanity is at a fraught crossroads.

Which isn’t to say that the film isn’t frightening. There are myriad unbearably tense and disturbing scenes, steeped in the impossible dread of being stuck somewhere far from safety, surrounded by unseen things lurking in the shadows. Boyle mixes the frenzied camerawork of the first film with a sinister stillness—perhaps the scariest single image in the movie is a wide shot of a lone, distant figure standing at the edge of a field. That terror is offset by disarming beauty: scenes saturated with bucolic color, overgrown ruins at the center of stunning vistas. 28 Years Later is an effective fusing of Boyle’s many signature sensibilities, complemented by the addition of something new: a wearier, elder perspective on chaos and entropy.

Whether 28 Years Later is a satisfying franchise followup, 18 years after the last entry, will have to be decided by the beholder. I found myself confused by the film’s unexpected tone, but also captivated by it. Knowing that another film in the series has already been shot goes a long way toward softening the blunt impact of the film’s sudden, ambiguous ending. 28 Years Later is, ultimately, only half of a longer saga: the next installment, The Bone Temple (that title will make sense once you’ve seen Years Later), will be out sometime next year. It’s not directed by Boyle, though Garland wrote the screenplay.

We’ll have to see how director Nia DaCosta can complete their vision. What she’s got to work off of is erratic but arresting, an alteration of the post-9/11 paranoia of 28 Days Later to better fit the mutated fear and anxiety of our own troubling era. Something wicked has already come and now we’re left to deal with it.