Movies & TV 28 Years Later 28 Years Later Is a Weird and Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Adventure This movie is probably not what you were expecting. In a very good way. By Leah Schnelbach | Published on June 20, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share If you’ve been looking forward to 28 Years Later expecting a tense, high octane, scare-a-minute horror movie, I feel it’s best to warn you now: that movie does show up—in the last five minutes. (Except then it hilarious, not just scary, and it’s thrilling as hell and made me very excited for the next film in this new trilogy, The Bone Temple.) For the two hours before that, Alex Garland and Danny Boyle take a thoughtful, meditative look at what life would actually be like nearly 30 years after the outbreak of the Rage Virus. If you’re looking for the frenetic chase scenes of the first two films, you’ll only find them occasionally; honestly there’s a bigger jump scare in the new Wes Anderson movie. What you get instead is a movie about a family trying to make a life in this world. You get a relentlessly realistic look at what happens to humanity when they’re cut off from larger society. You get a movie that is beautifully weird. This film is overflowing with ideas, and it’s exciting and strange and I wholeheartedly recommend it. It isn’t scary, the way the first film in the series was—but then again 28 Days Later helped invent a whole horror subgenre, and how often is a filmmaker going to pull that off? Here, Boyle and Garland have made a really cool choice to intercut the action with Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Boots” and scenes from Laurence Olivier’s film of Henry V, and also to linger over 1950s-era paintings of Queen Elizabeth that decorate Holy Island’s community hall. The UK, abandoned by the world, throws itself back on past glory to try to survive. This is very much a post-COVID, post-BREXIT film, about the resilience of the human spirit if not always its mind, and the more I think about it the more I like it. If I can invent a subgenre: Post-apocalyparesque? There is a scene, foreshadowed early on, that when it actually happened it made me hold my breath, and then laugh with delight when they pulled it off. There is a scene that made me cry. We begin in the Scottish Highlands, during that first terrifying outbreak 28 years ago. The virus tears through a small town, and we watch a weirdly giddy Reverend give a crucifix to a young boy before telling him to run and giving himself up to a horde of infected. This scene is one of the few that feels like the old films. It’s all screaming, chaos, and terror. After that we’re in the future. Or, well, now. The Virus was beaten back from the Continent, and now the UK is utterly cut off from the rest of the planet, under a quarantine that sees massive tankers patrol the seas around it. No one can leave, and anyone who sets foot on land has to stay. There is seemingly no humanitarian aid, no supply drops tossed down from helicopters, nothing. For a moment my brain recoiled at this break with reality—surely humanity wouldn’t have allowed this nightmare to continue? Surely people would send in dinghies full of medicine and food, at least? Then I came to my senses and focused back on the movie. (I do wonder if they’d drop a cure if one was found? Or has medical science given the UK up as lost forever and stopped even researching?) A community of uninfected humans has cropped up on Holy Island, off the Northeast coast of England, connected to the mainland by a long, thin causeway that’s only accessible at low tides, and that will feel eerily familiar to any fans of The Woman in Black. The island is ringed by high wooden walls, and several people spend shifts in the watchtowers, making sure no infected try to make it across. The people of the community have done surprisingly well: they farm, they pool supplies, they have lots of kids and a school for those kids that seems to teach a mix of basic education and post-apocalyptic survival skills—archery is a BIG deal here. When the tides are low, raiding parties go across to the mainland to forage more supplies… and to practice killing Infected. We join the story on the morning that a man named Jamie takes his kid, Spike, for his first big trip across the causeway. Spike’s only 12—the usual age for this initiation ritual is 14 or 15—but his dad is sure he’s ready. And yes, things go a little awry, but not in the way you might expect. In the interest of not spoiling anything I’ll say that the first section of the film really is a slice-of-life family drama more than anything else. Garland and Boyle ask how people would realistically live in this situation, and they find some fascinating answers. There is extraordinary beauty to be found in a mostly post-human landscape, but also a few mysteries and potential terrors that I think will be explored more in the next film. Even more interesting is that they’ve leaned into the idea that humans, at least in the UK, are on two separate tracks now. The Infected aren’t revenants or zombies, after all, they’re people. They’re social, and left to their own devices they form a community of their own. Kind of. Spike is a winning protagonist. Alfie Williams is great at showing us Spike’s fear, but also tempering it with the fact that this is the only life the boy’s ever known. To him, the Infected aren’t victims of a virus, or mutated humans, or a judgement from a deity—he thinks of them more like 19th Century Kentuckians would have thought of bears: they’re in the woods all the time, they might kill you if you get too close so always have a weapon at the ready, and if they chase you you’re fucked. The one note of wonder is that this is his first trip across the causeway. After years of hearing stories, and watching his elders cross over for raids (and presumably not everyone made it back) it’s his turn to step into adulthood, and that’s just as awesome and scary as you’d expect. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is perfect as Jamie. He’s nurturing and proud, and supportive in a way I found surprising in this genre of movie. But he also isn’t perfect, because no dad is, and Spike finds himself siding more with his mother Isla, played by Jodie Comer. Isla is ill, but with no real doctors or medication available anymore, no one’s quite sure what’s wrong—just that she isn’t Infected. (If she was Infected they would have killed her already.) Comer does a great job with the difficult role of being ambiguously sick. Edvin Ryding is excellent in a prickly role as an outsider to the community. And maybe best of all we have Ralph Fiennes as Ian Kelson, who has tried to make his own way in a post-Outbreak world. Fiennes’ performance here might be my favorite non-Sinners acting of the year so far—I’m trying so hard not to give stuff away, but he really leans into the strangeness of the film. One last note: The cinematography (by Anthony Dod Mantle) editing (by Jon Harris), and soundtrack (by Young Fathers) are all fantastic. When we do get real action scenes, they’re chaotic enough to feel real, but, importantly, I always knew where everyone was. There are particular moments with slower members of the Infected that are deliciously drawn out. And again, while I wasn’t exactly scared at any point, this team, and especially Young Fathers, created an eerie atmosphere that made me feel like I was pretty much extinct, if that makes sense? Like I was seeing into a world where humans were an afterthought. I’ve alluded to the next film in this trilogy a few times now, and just to be clear: 28 Years Later seems to end with The Bone Temple’s beginning. At least I hope it does, because the scene at the end of the film is a jolt of weird new energy, and Jack O’Connell is riveting for the few moments he’s there. If the next film is as good as this one, we’re all in for a treat when it hits theaters in January.[end-mark] The post <em>28 Years Later</em> Is a Weird and Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Adventure appeared first on Reactor.