’28 Years Later’ Isn’t the Film You Thought It Would Be
The following article contains minor spoilers for 28 Years Later.
A shuddering group of terrified Scottish kids huddle in front of a TV, on which Dipsy, Po, Tinky-Winky, and Laa-Laa dance in front of Teletubby Hill. Outside, the tell-tale sounds of commotion: shouting, smashing, distant screams. But then an eerie quiet seems to fall. One of the kids presses his ear up against the door. Suddenly, a pair of twitching maniacs burst through, their eyes bloodshot and filled with—yep, you guessed it—rage. If you’ve seen one of the trailers for 28 Years Later, you’ll have a good sense of what happens next. Let’s put it this way: Noo-Noo would have one hell of a clean-up job.
Like the infamous intro of 28 Weeks Later in which Robert Carlyle is chased through the countryside by dozens of rabid infected freaks, what follows is another breakneck prologue that sets the tone early on; not only is this film going to be scary, it is also clearly brutal enough to make its first on-screen victims children. (Well, mostly on-screen; director Danny Boyle does parents a solid and cuts away from the goriest bits.) And, given the hero of the film is a 12-year-old boy, played tremendously by newcomer Alfie Williams, it helps to establish that, in this merciless apocalypse of nitro-fueled zombies, anyone can die, including kids who had spent their morning watching Teletubbies.
Following that nasty intro—which, in a zany callback to 28 Days, also takes us to a church—we pick up 28 years after the rage virus laid waste to Britain. An opening scroll gives us the rundown as to what has gone on in the interim: as seen in 28 Weeks Later, attempts to repatriate Britain failed, resulting in a brief European outbreak that was conveniently quashed off-screen, with the virus pushed back to the UK. (Sorry, 28 superfans, no official word on whether Paris was nuked or not.) The country was then plunged into a ruthlessly enforced quarantine by NATO, leaving the few remaining survivors to fend for themselves. One such survivor enclave is situated just offshore in the north of England, on Holy Island, a modest rock separated from the mainland by a causeway that sinks into the sea at high tide.
Three decades without electricity, modern medicine, and with only the most basic agriculture has seen the community regress into an analogue state akin to the Dark Ages. They have formed their own traditions, norms and values, most of which centre on survival in an infected world; the kids are taught early on how to handle a bow and arrow, and that to stop an infected person in their tracks, you must hit them in the head or heart. It’s a sort of chipper existence, really, despite the conditions they are forced to endure, which they do with a classically British stiff-upper-lip. It’s all very “Keep Calm, and Carry On”—made all the more overt by the framed portrait of Queen Elizabeth II that overlooks the town hall.
It’s a Friday, and Spike (Williams) should be at school, but dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) has a much bigger plan for him: it’s time for his rite-of-passage trip to the mainland. In the bedroom upstairs, mum Isla (Jodie Comer) squirms in pain, struck with a mysterious illness that has left her foggy and forgetful—and, well, angry. Despite her protests that Jamie is a “baby killer,” garnished by a slew of C-words, for taking Spike on such a perilous trek at his young age, the father-son duo head out. What Spike finds is a decayed landscape reclaimed by nature that is more dangerous— and yet, somehow, more staggeringly beautiful—than suggested in his bedtime stories. It’s around here that you realize 28 Years isn’t just a straightforward horror flick: more to the point, it’s a coming-of-age film about one kid’s loss of adolescent innocence, albeit in a world inhabited by rage-infected psychos.
