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28 Years Later, Sony Pictures Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 19, 2025

With 28 Years Later, director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland return to the zombie-infested world they created 23 years prior in 28 Days Later. The sequel, which acknowledges but dismisses the developments of 28 Weeks Later, is an ambitious tale, establishing itself as the first part of a boy's coming of age, set against the terrors, cruelties, and harsh realities of a post-apocalyptic world.

To be clear, the film doesn't tell a complete story, although, to be fair, it does arrive at a logical and enticing conclusion. Regardless, it is a film filled with intriguing characters, who don't always match our expectations of them, and, like the previous two installments of this series, provocative ideas about the nature of humanity. These films may get a horrifying boost from the presence of the zombie-like "infected," people contaminated by the Rage Virus that turns them into violent creatures seemingly operating solely on id. That element, though, has always been something of a secondary thought, as well.

Those unafflicted with the virus in these films are just as capable and as willing of enacting violence and even worse acts of cruelty. The question, then, isn't about the virus and its effects. It's more about what societal downfall, desperation, and the need to survive can do to ordinary people.

With the virus existing and the collapse of civilization being a near-constant in their third decade in this story, the setup of Garland's screenplay imagines a world that has accepted this new reality. After a startling prologue set in the early days of the infection (The first victims of the rage-infested zombies are a group of kids, and a local minister, the father of the sole survivor of that outbreak, welcomes the epidemic as a sign of the end-times), we're introduced—28 years later, of course—to a small village of survivors. They live on an island off the mainland of the United Kingdom, which is under quarantine after the disease nearly spread to Europe. This community is protected by walls and a causeway, separating the island from the coast and only accessible at low tide.

The focal point quickly becomes 12-year-old Spike (an especially good Alfie Williams), the son of Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a well-liked hunter in the community, and Isla (Jodie Comer), who is suffering from inexplicable memory issues. The father has decided that it's time for his son to visit the mainland and participate in a rite of passage: killing his first infected.

That setup seems simple enough, but Boyle infuses Spike's hunt with pointed flourishes. Namely, the filmmaker intercuts the father-son journey with images of children and soldiers from military processions and wars past, while also juxtaposing the striking image of a forest almost completely felled for the building of the community with footage of 20th-century logging efforts. For all that has changed in the aftermath of the rage infestation, humanity itself remains what it always has been.

From there, the film continues the thematic notions from the previous entries, primarily having to do with conflicts of philosophy surrounding survival, and introduces some new complications. The biggest one, perhaps, is the apparent evolution of the infected over the course of almost three decades. Most of them remain the same, sprinting at any uninfected human in their vicinity to attack with fury, but Spike and Jamie's first encounter with them is quite different. These ones are almost pitiable, crawling on the ground to forage for food, mainly worms, and seemingly realizing that these hunters are more a threat to them than they are to the humans. That the four infected that the pair come across appear to exist as a family unit only raises more questions, elaborated upon when a pregnant infected is introduced later.

There's another evolution to the infected, which is that they now exist as tribes, led by "alphas" that don't fall with single hits from arrows or bullets and bypass infecting humans in favor of brutally killing them. Those infected are imposing, frightening figures here, and that these tribal units have the air of what the social structures and behavior of early humans might have been like (The musical score accompanying them is composed of percussion and howls) only helps to solidify the connection between the infected and the human survivors on a primal level.

Obviously, the film necessarily comes up short in answering these questions or really exploring these concepts. That's one of the downsides of this installment being only part of a whole story, but Spike's journey, which has him leaving the community with his mother to find help for her, is compelling on its own. The search leads the two to meet Erik (Edvin Ryding), a Swedish military man who is the sole survivor of a team enforcing the quarantine and who doesn't see the infected as anything other than targets, and to head in the direction of Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes). Rumors and appearances are that the once-good doctor has gone mad, and while that might be true, it should also be said that Fiennes' performance brings a calm, wise method to that state of mind.

We will, of course, have to wait to see if a follow-up can pay off the promise of this installment (The weird, almost Dickensian group of outcasts that shows up at the end seems a good start). Even if the story within it isn't a complete one, though, 28 Years Later does stand on its own as a smart, subversive continuation and expansion of this series.

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