Eighteen years after the release of the second franchise installment, “28 Weeks Later,” Academy Award-winning filmmaker Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland (“Civil War”) belatedly return to their zombie-ish rage virus pandemic horror thriller, “28 Years Later,” and it is decidedly with mixed results.
Attempting to push the genre and franchise forward, Boyle and Garland use heart, humor, horror, thrills, and a couple of evolutions to the infected, some of which don’t work, some of which disrupt the suspension of disbelief by exaggerating things headlong a little too far into the preposterous. Ultimately, it’s a mostly welcome and visceral return to the franchise, all in all, but it’s certainly not without its problems.
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“28 Years Later” begins with a horrific, but awkward prologue. It’s 28 years earlier in the highlands of Scotland. A group of children nervously watches Tellytubbies to soothe them while the terror of the horrifying infected rages all around them, and a massacre occurs. One boy escapes, finding his father, a bishop, in a church, and attempting to find safety. But the only salvation to be found is the warped judgment of his spiritually broken father, who looks at this impending armageddon, not as the apocalypse, but as a divine deliverance from the mighty hand above. Have faith and hope he cries as the disease-ridden humans devour him.. This prologue, while fascinating, suffers from terrible use of pop music, perhaps attempted as an ironic juxtaposition, but it just taints the entire sequence.
Fast forwarding 28 years to the present day, Boyle’s movie delivers context: Europe pushed back the rest of the infected, but the United Kingdom is a lost cause, abandoned, quarantined and cut off from the rest of the world. Lindisfarne, aka Causeway Island (also known as Holy Island, also featured in the HBO mini-series, “The Third Day”), a remote island in North Eastern England has become a heavily-defended refuge for a community of survivors, cut off from the rest of the infected, thanks to the rising daily tides.
On the island, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a scavenger and devoted father, is about to take his 12-year-old son Spike (a stand-out Alfie Williams) on a rite of passage: heading to the mainland to hunt and kill infected zombies.
Isla, Spike’s mother, is having none of it and thinks Jamie is insane. But battling a mysterious illness, easily confused and distraught, she soon forgets what the drama was all about, and Jamie and Spike head out on their adventure.
Twenty-eight years later, however, the infected have evolved. Needing food and water to exist as they still are human beings at their core and not undead zombies, some have become what is known as the sloughs, slimy, decayed and degraded infected that are slow, bulbous blobs, scavenging for worms and grubs and anything at all to subsist on. These make for easy kills and excellent training for Spike and his infected-killing baptism.
But there are also what are known as Alphas: essentially super zombies that are infected and more intelligent, more ruthless, have leadership capabilities, and are monstrously vicious and terrifying.

The plot eventually leads them to a sense of hope—at least for Spike—in the knowledge that a doctor exists and could save his dying mother. Said doctor, Dr. Ian Kelson, a survivor of the outbreak (Ralph Fiennes), has reportedly gone mad; however, the causeway island dwellers steer clear of the legend of his unhinged ways.
Of course, Spike is determined, and an after-zombie-killing initiation party that exposes his father’s adulterous ways further fuels his motivation. Soon, he takes his mother on a pilgrimage to find a doctor and a cure for her mysterious madness.
Along the way, there are survivors they come across—Erik Sundqvist (Edvin Ryding), a Swedish NATO soldier who finds himself stranded on the mainland of North East England while on a routine North Sea quarantine Patrol—but mostly fear, death and impending peril all around them.
There’s even a—one cannot even spoil it—but this evolution of the infected feels like a bridge too far and even provoked unintentional laughter in our screening.
Half a story, as it is an obvious part one with a cliffhanger, “28 Years Later” ends with a baffling conclusion, filled with a ridiculousness that feels like an odd note to end on. Without too many spoilers, it introduces a cult of survivors with a religious bent and an actor (who we shall not name, but it’s easy enough to find on Wikipedia) that has made the tonally odd choice of playing his role like a grandstanding peacock.
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So, several of these weird, odd elements distract from what might be a more classic “28 Days Later” franchise installment. Granted, they also make the film feel a little different, and unexpected, and filmmakers are constantly looking for the qualities that make their movies feel fresh; nonetheless, many feel like intonationally peculiar choices.
Boyle, as is his want (see “Trance” and “A Life Less Ordinary” and occasionally “127 Hours”), tends to overdirect the movie. When he’s at his best, Boyle delivers controlled kinetic chaos, and at his worst, erratic, tonal sloppiness, and “28 Years Later” tends to fall into that latter camp.
The film is replete with jarring, sometimes unpredictable editing, Zack Snyder-like bursts of action showiness, incongruent stock footage, and offbeat mood shifts and tenor like the sudden comedy of the final act.
“28 Years Later” also tries to tug at the heartstrings with the wrenching pain about family struggles. And while, on their own, these scenes, bordering on the spiritual and ascending, are moving, the transition to these heavenly scenes (think Danny Boyle getting his emotional cues from Sigur Rós, a melodramatic band he has leveraged before) is never as elegant as one would hope.
“28 Years Later” for all its horror and franchise trappings is essentially a boy on a mission movie; a young lad ventures into the mainland’s dark heart to save his mother, where he discovers secrets, mutations and new horrors of every stripe.
Ironically, the film’s screenwriter Alex Garland has suggested in the past that part of the reason he split from Boyle in their collaborations is that—while he loved the director’s narrative propulsion— his lack of grace and nuance for the material cinematically was beginning to chafe him. And certainly those same clumsy, clunky, too heavy-handed qualities are all over this belated threequel.
And to that end, thankfully, the film’s real revelation is that 14-year-old Alfie Williams. For all of the names in the picture, it’s an ensemble built around him, and Williams proves his mettle and will undoubtedly have a long and prosperous career after this film. When the film falters, and it does often in its inconsistencies, his emotional conviction and reliably poignant performance never does.
Obviously, with more to come, “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” arriving in early 2026, the narrative may feel more complete in the end. And as it stands, this first installment, however flawed, is enough to compel audiences to take the walkway across islands to the next terrifying chapter. One just hopes that Garland gently reins in Boyle for the next installment. [B-]
“28 Years Later” opens on June 20 via Sony Pictures.