It can often feel like you need to make a trade-off in horror movies. If you want the fright factor, the gore, violence, hiding-behind-your-hands type of terror, it can come at the cost of a deeper narrative focus. But then the horror movies — often redundantly referred to as “elevated horror” — that pack a meaningful punch when it comes to their stories, with underlying themes of mental illness, womanhood, or race and class, are so zoned in on the script that they forget they’re meant to terrorize their audience. Masterworks like the films of Ari Aster balance both, but more often than not, it can be difficult to find a movie that can go both ways. Take Sinners, a colossal hit at the box office that was incredibly well-made by Ryan Coogler, a powerful horror twist on racism in the American South. Still, it didn’t fully deliver on the vampiric carnage it promised to frighten us with. 28 Years Later, Danny Boyle’s highly anticipated sequel to his 2002 sleeper hit, 28 Days Later, sits firmly in the Aster camp, delivering an exciting, terrifying, and frenzied zombie movie while forging a story of mortality, morality, what makes a true hero in the face of adversity, and the importance of accepting the most inevitable thing in life: death. 28 Years Later may very well be Danny Boyle’s best movie since Trainspotting. Yes, I do think it lands above the original 28 Days Later, and it’s a hair above his criminally underrated sci-fi cult hit, Sunshine. Pared down to the very basics, 28 Years Later is about finding beauty and meaning amidst unthinkable horror — and, at the end of every dark day, isn’t that what this genre is all about?
’28 Years Later’ Doesn’t Have a Typical Structured Story

28 Years Later begins with a group of children, terrified and crying, watching an episode of Teletubbies. (Thank you, Danny Boyle, for finally seeing and using the inherent creepy quality of these big-ass puppets). Their panicked parents are soon ravaged and turned into rageful zombies, feasting on their own children. If you forgot how unrelenting this franchise was in its tragedy and horror, Boyle hits you with it like a punch to the head five minutes in. Twenty-eight years later, the United Kingdom and Ireland have been completely quarantined and left to fend for themselves. Twelve-year-old Spike (Spike Williams) lives on an island off the Highlands of Scotland in a relatively convivial and peaceful community. Certain people venture onto the mainland over a rocky footbridge for resources. Spike’s father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), is a skilled marksman and fearless fighter, and he’s keen to make his son into the same man of steel. His mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), is bedbound and delirious with memory loss from an unknown illness that can’t be treated as there is no doctor on the island. It’s Spike’s first time going to the mainland with his father, and the town celebrates it as a joyous rite of passage. There, they first meet a variant of the zombies that crawl at a snail’s pace and are easy to kill. But then they have a run-in with the terrifying, rabid, and fast ones we’ve seen before, led by the Alpha, their terrifying leader. Spike then learns that there’s a doctor on the mainland who could help his mother, and despite the horrors he’s just been exposed to, he’s desperate to get Isla the help she needs. I’m being intentionally vague about the structure of the narrative, as it was a wonderful experience not being able to tell where the story was going. The trailers have also been purposefully veiled in what the entire story revolves around, and that’s probably also in part because the script returns the franchise to the smaller scale of the original. 28 Weeks Later tried to introduce immunity to the virus, as well as other countries (America) getting involved. While there is an army presence in Years, this story starts and ends with the people of this small community, specifically Spike, our new unlikely hero. The movie is about his coming-of-age experience in a world both utterly unrecognizable and similar to our own.
Danny Boyle and Alex Garland Are at the Height of Their Powers

The pièce de résistance of 28 Years Later is its high-intensity chase scenes. While the scenes of arrows blistering into the necks of rageful zombies are exhilarating, the real panic and terror here is created by the speed at which they run. As a staunch horror fan, it’s been rare recently that I get genuinely scared and startled while watching big-studio movies. Here, I might not have been hiding behind my hands, but I was on the edge of my seat for the majority of the film. The Alpha, a new concept in this franchise, is one of the most threatening and inherently scary zombies I’ve ever seen; less rabid and crazed and more focused on its one objective — to catch its prey. This installment is also a lot more violent and gory — intestines flying around the place, decapitated heads with the spine still attached, and enough splattering blood to satisfy Eli Roth. It’s by no means the bloodiest movie on offer, but for casual horror lovers, expect to be pushed to your limits. Boyle’s directorial style skips past his Oscar contenders and even the original 28 Days Later to his magnum opus, 1996’s Trainspotting. 28 Years Later feels like a coming-of-age teen story, an end-of-the-world horror movie, and a spiritual journey for meaning all at once. It’s the same genre mixing of Trainspotting that feels both chaotic and purposeful, as Boyle ensures every choice, cut, and atmospheric shift is perfectly timed and executed. He’s aided here massively by editor Jon Harris, a perfect choice for this mishmash of ideas, as his filmography includes movies of all styles and thematic ideas, from Layer Cake to Boyle’s Trainpotting 2 to The Descent.

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Sony, don’t go after him.

The surrealism swirls with the brutality of the situations the characters find themselves in is perfectly encapsulated in the movie’s most gorgeous-looking and terrifying scene. Spike and Jamie are running from the Alpha across the rocky bridge, and Boyle turns the sky into a purple-tinged starry galaxy, a backdrop straight out of a Disney film that’s oddly perfect for the movie’s most petrifying scene. Shots of Spike and his father embarking to the mainland are sliced and diced with archival footage of wars past and reconstructed scenes of horseback knights riding into battle. Harris’s work on The Descent comes into great effect with some truly creepy red-tinged night-vision scenes. It’s as if Boyle has been waiting to expel his style to its fullest for the past 30 years, having wasted it on twee rom-coms like Yesterday and restraining it for Hollywood award contenders à la Steve Jobs. It’s wonderful to see the auteur return to a project that allows him to let his freak fly and masterfully paint his canvas with different colors and varying strokes. And then comes in Alex Garland, who manages to ground Boyle’s bombastic style with another of his philosophical stories. 28 Years Later isn’t taking on the world’s biggest issues like in Civil War, nor is it operating in a sci-fi universe akin to the one in Annihilation. Garland’s script revolves around a young child reckoning with the truth of the remnants of the world that has been savaged by death and despair on an unthinkable level. 28 Days Later stayed close to the tried-and-true ethos most zombies have kept — “humans can be just as bad if not worse than the undead.” But with The Last of Us being such a colossal hit, Garland and Boyle ensure that their story feels more evolved and fresh in this subgenre. 28 Years Later really is about acceptance. Acceptance of death, of love, of knowing when to stop and when to keep moving, and that the world is not what your parents tell you it is. Within two hours, we watch Spike learn that his father isn’t the hero he thinks he is and that the very thing he has been brought up to fear and evade isn’t so scary. It’s as if Garland is writing in response to every zombie story ever told, trying to offer an antidote to the loss of humanity while still putting it on full display.
Alfie Williams and Ralph Fiennes Give Terrific Performances in ’28 Years Later’

Image via Sony Pictures

For as much going on in Boyle’s direction and Garland’s script, there’s still enough space to allow the actors to shine, particularly Williams and Ralph Fiennes. Alfie Williams is another extraordinary young breakout this year, never stalling when pulled in the multiple different directions that the film asks of him. The eager young child who wants to explore the world archetype in these survival movies can often be overly brave or stupidly naive. Here, Williams plays Spike as a young teen, understandably excited to prove himself a fighter to his macho father, but once they leave the island, Williams always allows the fear and terror to wash over Spike’s face. Comer gives a heart-wrenching performance as Spike’s sick mother who never feels like a caricature or one-note. Despite Isla often forgetting the basics of her son, Williams and Comer build a close chemistry that transcends Isla’s memory loss to forge a tangible mother-son bond. However, it is Ralph Fiennes who, unsurprisingly, packs the biggest punch. As Dr. Kelson, Fiennes carries the brunt of the film’s thematic weight on his shoulders. Fiennes is drawing on his dramatic, Shakespearean training to bring one of his most tender and intelligent characters ever, as he teaches Spike that life and death aren’t the pinnacles of good and evil. The bigger ideas of Garland’s script only really come alive once Fiennes enters, and it’s his soft, theatrical musings on morality that make 28 Years Later such a stand-out in a saturated subgenre. As said before, 28 Years Later doesn’t just feel like an epic zombie movie or a deeply personal story set against an otherworldly situation. It does both of these things expertly, but what I was most touched by was its basic ethos being such a simple but effective reflection of the horror genre in general. Fiennes’ Dr. Kelson is surrounded by death, decay, violence, and other unthinkable atrocities that would send anyone in their right mind running in the other direction. He’s stigmatized and isolated by others who think of him as a depraved shell of a human. But once Spike and Isla meet him, he’s perhaps the person with the most humanity left, simply trying to mow through the darkness to bring out the light in any way he can. And I think that’s the perfect illustration of why people watch horror movies: to find meaning and purpose in places you’d least expect it, because, oftentimes, that’s where you’ll find the greatest source of empowerment to keep trailing forwards. Boyle and Garland do it again, and in many ways, even better than what they created together 23 years ago. (However, the last three minutes were such a loud tonal change-up that I couldn’t help but burst out laughing. The sequel, The Bone Temple, is going to be wild.) An exciting and terrifying horror movie, a fresh and nuanced entry into the zombie catalog, a mesmerizing philosophical tale, all packed into a coming-of-age structure, 28 Years Later is one of the best zombie horror movies we’ve been given in years. 28 Years Later comes to theaters on June 20.

28 Years Later

28 Years Later outdoes its predecessor by crafting a story that feels bigger while keeping the franchise close to its humble roots.

Release Date

June 20, 2025

Runtime

126 minutes

Director

Danny Boyle

Pros & Cons

The chase scenes are electrifying with the zombies feeling scarier and more threatening.
Boyle’s stylish direction is a perfect opposites-sttract counterpart to Garlan’s humane script.
Ralph Fiennes gives one of his best performances to date as a survivor looking for light within the darkness.

The ending that sets up the sequel is such a tone shift that it made me burst out laughing.
The female characters are given much less to do than the men.