Given all the zombie fare we’ve had since 2002, did we really need another sequel to 28 Days Later?  I didn’t recall being all that impressed by the first sequel, that being 2007’s 28 Weeks Later.  In the time we waited in vain for 28 Months Later, we’ve seen The Walking Dead (and its many spin-offs), Train to Busan, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and additional entries in the REC, Resident Evil and Romero “of the Dead” series.  Jim Jarmusch even dipped a rotten toe in the genre and, once you have that indie darling filmmaker doing that, you start getting the feeling the zombie genre should be left for dead.

And yet, here we are in 2025 and Danny Boyle has delivered 28 Years Later.  Among the questions one might reasonably ask is whether it tells a new story. Does it explore any particular angles which haven’t already been covered ad nauseum in so many films, and so many of them so gory that they will leave some viewers nauseous?

The good news is that this does have an interesting tale to spin.  Even better news is it is a deeply human, and humane, story.  What is odd is I left with the feeling that could have been told outside of a horror film, and that the element of the undead is more like window dressing.  Or, intestines draped all over the landscape, as is likely to be seen in such fare.

In a way, you get two movies.  Roughly the first half is the solidly post-apocalyptic portion while the second half nearly sidelines the undead, so that we can have a more contemplative and personal story.  This is in keeping with the spirit of the initial installment from 2002, where the back half of the runtime concerned humans who are more monstrous than the actual monsters.  What transpires in this latest film is considerably different than that in several ways, but I will not say anything more here to possibly ruin any surprises.

Also similar to that film, we start out with a startling action horror sequence which precedes the timeframe of the film proper by some interval of time.  It is no surprise what we see takes place 28 years before the present.  In this, children are watching Teletubbies, clearly terrified by the strange sounds they hear beyond the door of the room they have been sternly instructed not to leave.  The inevitable hoard of zombies inevitably infiltrates the room and only one boy manages to escape.  The juxtaposition of screaming children as blood splatters across images of the Teletubbies is disturbing.

Then we jump to the present and to an island off the Scottish coast where a community of survivors includes our chief protagonists, father and son played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Alfie Williams.  There is also a wife and mother played by Jodie Comer.  She vacillates between moments of lucidity and delusion.  Sometimes she thinks it is the world before the radical change.  At other times, she is fully in the present.  At one point, she believes her son to be her father.

When we first see the family, it is the day of an important initiation ritual.  Williams is making his first trip to the mainland.  He will be accompanied by Taylor-Johnson, but this journey is extremely dangerous.  The trip is only possible twice a day, when low tide exposes an elevated path across the causeway.  I guess everybody forgot how to make boats in the intervening decades. 

In the exposition before they leave the compound, we learn there will not be a rescue mission if they should fail to return.  Naturally, things go badly and father and son end up having to make the crossing while the tide is coming in.  There is a delay when they reach the main gate as they have to prove they have not been infected.  Seems to me this facility could use some sort of airlock or quarantine area.

They needed to get back inside the compound even faster than usual, because they are being pursued by an “alpha”, a concept new to the series in this entry.  The undead have evolved to hunt in packs, with leaders which are beefy and have the capacity to plan.  One disturbing habit of theirs is ripping the heads and most of the attached spinal column out of their kills.  I’m going to blame 80’s arcade fighter Mortal Kombat for this.  That reminds me, an odd technique applied in most of the kills is something akin to the ol’ “bullet time” effect, and this makes those moments of violence look like something out of a video game.

One bit that has me confused about the alphas is the one that chases our heroes seems to direct a colony of bats towards his prey.  I wasn’t sure if the bats were already flying in that direction and he was only gesturing.  I also swear the bats almost form letters in the air, but I caught this in a theater and they tend to frown on recording the screen.  Also, the projectionist wouldn’t take a bribe afterwards to rescreen just that one part.

Another element new to the world of this series is zombies getting pregnant, which introduces all kinds of disturbing possibilities.  I won’t say which aspects of that this film chooses to pursue, but I will say I immediately wondered whether a baby would be born uninfected and, if so, whether it would be turned or instead protected by the mother.  Assuming the former, I then wondered how they would grow up into adult undead.  I wouldn’t think zombies could grow, yet we briefly see what appear to be children in a couple of scenes.  So, have they been perpetual children for upwards of 28 years now or are these maturing zombie kids?  Some of the dialogue speculates about the zombies growing in some way akin to taking steroids.

It is difficult to say more about the film without giving away too much.  There are even elements revealed in the trailers which I won’t approach, as I feel those aspects are best left discovered by the viewer.  An interesting plot development concerns a huge fire in distance witnessed by father and son during their day on the mainland.  There’s also some interesting foreshadowing involving a turned man hanging upside down in a house, the letters I, M, M and Y carved into his chest.  I assume there is a “J” below the beltline, unless a character named Immy will be introduced at some point.

One distinctive visual element of the production of the 2002 film was it being shot entirely on MiniDV.  Alas, that proved to be a limitation over the years, as the resolution of that format is lower than that of blu-ray.  The 2025 installment is shot on this era’s MiniDV, and that is the extensive (though not exclusive) use of iPhones. 

There were some design decisions which mildly annoyed me.  I was confused by multiple interjections early on of footage of soldiers in Laurence Olivier’s Henry V firing volleys of arrows.  While bows and arrows are the weapon on choice in the world of the film, I didn’t understand the importance of these drop-ins from the other picture.  Is it just a statement on the rich history of archery in the history of England? Is it an indictment of the country’s inability to remain peaceful? I’m still chewing on this.

In fact, I have more than a few questions, some of which are annoying me the next day more than others.  In the opening scene, the father of the boy who survives the onslaught is the local priest and he welcomes the outbreak as the work of God.  The son hides under a grate in the floor while dad becomes zombie chow and the lad actually cries out, “Oh, father, why have you forsaken me?”  Cue eye roll and sneer from yours truly.  There’s also a curious recurring character, somebody in a creepy mask who may or may not really be real.  I know they sure seem to be all over the place at times. Their purpose, even as symbolism, eludes me.

There is very little humor, but what exists is welcome. Williams has never seen a cell phone, so when a character new to the island shows him one, he has some questions. Most of them seen to concern the owner’s alleged girlfriend, a photo of whom shows her with the outrageously puffy lips which can stop being a thing any minute now. Williams asks if she has something wrong with her, like perhaps a shellfish allergy. Also, something felt odd about this fleeting moment about phones when what we are seeing was likely recorded using one.

Overall, I enjoyed 28 Years Later.  It makes for an interesting comparison and contrast to the 2002 picture.  As far as the horror/action aspects of the film, the first is superior.  As for the more human, dramatic component, the latter is superior.  Alas, if there is one way this picture disappointed me, it is in the very last few minutes, when we have the lead-in to the next installment.  There is a complete tonal shift and some deeply unbelievable things happen.  Even so, I know I will be seeing that one when it is released.

Dir: Danny Boyle

Starring Jodie Comer, Alfie Williams, Aaron Taylor-Johnson

Watched in the theatre