28 Years Later

REVIEW:

The long-awaited return of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland to the 28 Days Later universe should have felt like a triumphant homecoming—two decades in the making, with a new story to tell and fresh horrors to explore. But 28 Years Later, while filled with potential and ambition, ultimately buckles under the weight of expectation. As one of my most anticipated movies of the year, I walked in hopeful and left deflated. I’ve learned over the years to never let anticipation cloud judgement, but the trailers promised something terrifying, raw, and urgent. What we got was an ambitious but confused film that couldn’t decide what it wanted to be.

Let’s talk about that marketing. The trailers were phenomenal—claustrophobic, dread-inducing, and full of that iconic rage-virus panic. They hinted at terror creeping into every frame, and I genuinely believed Boyle and Garland were about to gift us another genre classic. Sadly, those promises don’t materialise. There isn’t a single moment in the film that instilled fear, and while atmosphere and tension are attempted, they rarely land. The one exception is a standout sequence where Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his son Spike (Alfie Williams) are chased down a narrow causeway path toward Lindisfarne—the island where a small community of survivors now live off the UK mainland—by one of the new Alpha Infected. It’s tense, visceral, and beautifully shot—but it ends too soon and is never matched again.

Speaking of style, 28 Years Later boasts some bold and at times baffling technical choices. The movie was shot using iPhones, often rigged together for carousel-style pans during action and kill scenes. While I appreciate experimentation, these moments can feel unnecessarily jarring—too polished in concept yet rough in execution. There are times where it adds to the rawness, but more often than not, it pulls you out of the experience. That said, the film does retain the gritty visual identity of its predecessors, and the violence doesn’t hold back—thankfully. This is still a rage virus, and heads do roll. Or more specifically, skulls and spines are graphically yanked from torsos by the upgraded ‘Alpha’ Infected. It’s grotesque, it’s brutal, and it’s the kind of horror the rest of the film desperately needed more of.

The narrative structure feels like two different films stitched together. The first half focuses on Jamie taking his son out into the mainland wasteland for his “first kill,” treating survival like a family rite of passage. The second half pivots sharply, centring on Spike’s journey with his ailing mother Isla (Jodie Comer) as they search for a reclusive doctor (Ralph Fiennes), not knowing what’s wrong with her but hoping he can help. Both concepts have potential—either one could’ve worked on their own—but merging them dilutes the power of both. The tonal shift is so stark, the film loses all sense of rhythm. It tries to blend emotion, action, and horror, but the result is narrative whiplash.

Despite the tonal inconsistencies, the performances are excellent. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is unsettling and intense as Jamie, a man who seems to thrive in the wilderness and almost relishes the hunt. Alfie Williams delivers a breakout performance, capturing the trauma and curiosity of a child raised in an apocalypse. And Jodie Comer brings raw honesty to Isla, a mother whose illness causes her to forget where she is and who she’s with, grounding her performance in confusion and fading identity. Together, they elevate material that often fails them, making scenes feel more important than they are on paper. Ralph Fiennes is underused but still compelling, playing a man who collects the bodies of the dead and builds shrines from their skulls—a deeply strange figure who adds to the film’s unnerving texture.

The film opens with a clever nod to the previous entries by dropping us straight into outbreak day—effectively reintroducing the rage virus in brutal, chaotic fashion. A text crawl then explains how the infection was contained to the UK, which has since been abandoned by the rest of the world and sealed off from all entry and exit. It’s a chilling setup that immediately reestablishes the stakes. While the film acknowledges its predecessors, it largely forges its own path—Cillian Murphy does not reprise his role from the original in the movie at all, though Boyle has confirmed he will feature briefly in the sequel and play a more prominent role in the third film, if it goes ahead.

Then comes the ending. Oh, that ending. Enter Jack O’Connell as Jimmy—a cult leader with long peroxide-blonde hair, doing spin-kicks in a pastel tracksuit alongside an army followers also sporting colourful tracksuits. It’s surreal, tonally detached from everything that came before, and lands like a parody. The final fight against a pack of Infected feels more like a music video than a horror climax. I understand Boyle intended this jarring shift to serve as a hard reset, moving directly into the sequel’s plot—but the execution is baffling. And while I’m sure the next film will elaborate, I can’t ignore the distasteful echoes of Jimmy Savile in O’Connell’s styling. If the goal is to make him monstrous, there are countless more creative, less ethically questionable ways to do that. We don’t need to borrow the image of a real-life predator to underline fictional evil.

Ultimately, 28 Years Later is a film bursting with potential but unsure of how to channel it. It’s daring but incoherent, ambitious but confused. I’ll absolutely be watching the sequel—partly out of loyalty, partly out of curiosity—but I hope it brings clarity, cohesion, and the terror that this one lacked. If this film was a test balloon for what’s to come, here’s hoping Boyle and DaCosta use the feedback wisely. Because there’s still a great film buried beneath the rage. It just didn’t make it out this time.