Danny Boyle and Alex Garland have done it again. In the early 2000s, 28 Days Later became the most popular and influential zombie movie in decades, with its fast-moving, virally infected, not-quite-undead marauders rampaging through a post-apocalyptic England. Now Boyle and Garland have reunited with 28 Years Later, easily the most talked-about horror movie since Sinners, and the biggest zombie movie since the PG-13 dilutions of World War Z back in 2013. Compared with the countless familiar zombie movies and TV shows that have popped up since the original movie, 28 Years Later is a thorny, challenging, unpredictable work, which means there’s plenty to discuss now that it’s spent a well-attended weekend in wide release. Here are some major spoiler-heavy topics related to the film’s style, themes, sociological implications and, of course, that ending.
Zombie evolution
The original 28 Days Later is notable for its zombie efficiency. Rather than the slow shuffling and gradual, varying levels of undead decay often seen in zombie classics from George A Romero (and the many movies influenced by his films Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and so on), these zombies aren’t technically zombies at all. They’re victims of a lab-leaked “rage” virus (with the hilariously dodgy origins of … showing monkeys violent news footage?!) that seems to be spread by virtually any exposure to an infected person’s blood or saliva. Within a minute or two, the newly infected will be vomiting blood and attacking anyone around them in a deranged frenzy. The victims are analogous to zombies because of their seeming thirst for human carnage (though it’s never clear whether they’re truly “feeding” on humans) and the mindlessness with which they pursue it, but they’re a less supernatural variation than some of their ancestors. The same was true for the 2007 sequel 28 Weeks Later.
That’s still the case in 28 Years Later, but with the passage of time built into the story, Boyle and Garland introduce new variants on the post-viral populace. There are still mobs of rage-virus victims, often in rags or no clothing at all, roaming the countryside, which remains confined to the United Kingdom. But 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) and his dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) also encounter infected who have been grotesquely swollen by the virus, and now lurch belly-down around in the dirt, often subsisting on worms. On the other end of the spectrum, our heroes are also menaced by an “alpha” zombie who is bigger, stronger and craftier than the others. He also seems capable of reproducing, and not just because of his, ah, endowments. Later in the film, Spike and his ill mother Isla (Jodie Comer) encounter a woman who is both infected and pregnant – and is even distracted enough by the imminent arrival of her baby to allow Isla to lend a helping hand in the birth. Perhaps most surprisingly, the baby is born healthy, seemingly not infected with the virus. (The idea of an asymptomatic carrier, as seen in 28 Weeks Later, goes unmentioned, but it’s a fair bet that if the baby were infected, the humans who carry her around for the next day-plus would probably get sick at some point, too.)
The movie’s resident philosophical doctor-recluse Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) chalks this up to the miracles of the human placenta, which seems … oversimplified. But these zombie variants raise a lot of interesting questions. Are the alpha zombies evolving closer to what we think of as humanity, regaining some of their intelligence while maintaining a capacity for brutal violence? (He’s seen multiple times pulling off heads in tandem with spines, like something out of a Predator movie.) It’s vaguely implied that the alpha is the father to this newborn, suggesting that the zombies procreated post-infection, which is something these movies (or any movies? Surely there must be one with zombie sex, but it’s not a typical feature of the genre) haven’t shown before. Zombie reproductive rates must still be low; Dr Kelson points out that a human baby can’t really survive for more than a few days without milk, and if infected women can still breastfeed at all, it’s hard to imagine how that would work on a practical level, especially in terms of not spreading the virus. Maybe this baby, saved by Isla and Spike, is the first zombie-born human to survive.
Thematically, the baby’s arrival fits with the complication of the seemingly functional isolated community where Jamie and Isla have raised Spike. The baby, who Spike ultimately delivers back to the community before striking out on his own, implies that the world that they’ve understandably cut themselves off from nonetheless keeps turning, and may even produce new humans without the easiest and most comforting signs of renewal. Quite the opposite: the zombie variations give that outside world its own strange new shape, rather than showing the virus simply burning itself out in quarantine. Viewers will probably be split on whether dirt-crawlers or alphas are too cheesy, too reminiscent of other zombie pictures, too far afield from the relatively grounded viral origins of the first film. But in a movie that some audiences will probably also find short on traditional thrills, these elements keep the landscape strange and unpredictable.
Digital revolution
As a director, Boyle has long been known by a certain degree of flash; 28 Years Later evolves his style even further. The original film made innovative use of early digital video, which has held up remarkably well even as the tech itself has degraded; few movies have reproduced the grimy low-res immediacy that sometimes smears into a kind of poetic abstraction. For the sequel, Boyle and returning cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle haven’t reproduced this look, either. Instead, they’ve updated it, using inventive multi-iPhone rigs to capture similarly bracing images. Boyle and Mantle use this technology to shoot from Boyle’s trademark extreme angles and unexpected vantages, add micro-freeze-frames to scenes of particularly tense action, and deftly utilize real locations, adding up to one the most distinctive-looking movies of the year and a major triumph for Mantle. For all of its wild swings, his work never feels overloaded or sensationalized. Instead, the visuals guide the audience through a series of expectations-bending shifts, including passages where the movie feels more akin to a dark fairytale (with the alpha looming in shadow on the horizon) than a traditional horror picture. As with 28 Days Later, it’s easy to see how other film-makers might imitate some of these techniques on a superficial level. It’s also hard to picture others bringing them together with such virtuosity. Digital cinematography is now the norm; Boyle belongs with Michael Mann, Steven Soderbergh and David Fincher as some of the few mainstream directors who are able to embrace its differences from celluloid, rather than trying to hide them.
23 years later
Somewhat more time has passed in the world of the movie than in our world; technically, they’re five years further into the future than we are. In terms of release dates, the movies have taken us from an immediately post-9/11 world to one that still bears the scars and hears the echoes of the Covid pandemic, a rise of authoritarianism, and countless post-9/11 armed conflicts, including one unfolding in the Middle East right now. Boyle has specifically mentioned Brexit as a touchpoint in the development of 28 Years Later, which indeed sees Britain isolated – by force, rather than by choice – and festering. Though the movie doesn’t underline any Covid parallels too boldly, it could be read as a post-pandemic allegory, with Spike’s desire to rejoin the world, regardless of how it’s been altered from what his parents knew, conflicting with the strictness of the community he was born into – essentially a quarantine within a quarantine. Dr Kelson, in the meantime, is determined to memorialize the dead with his towering bone temple of skulls, rather than using his resources to move on or fortify his defenses (which also sets our sympathies apart from outright Covid denialism or the anti-vaccine crowd). It might be surprising for a sequel to a movie that came out in the shadow of 9/11 to traffic in messaging that could amount to “never forget”, but Boyle and Garland turn that mantra around to grapple with how we, as the collective human race, are expected to proceed as survivors of so many contemporary disasters. How many of those disasters came to pass in the rest of the world, which we’re told has been cleared of the rage virus, is another one of the movie’s enticing open questions.
What was that ending?
On paper, 28 Years Later ends on an infuriating sequel tease that leaves the movie largely unresolved. The reality is a bit more complicated than that. The film actually reaches a highly satisfying, if thoughtfully elegiac and open-ended, conclusion. After Dr Kelson makes an approximate diagnosis of terminal cancer for Isla, she asks him to be euthanized, and her son places her newly polished skull at the top of Kelson’s monument. Eventually, Spike returns to his island community alone – but only long enough to drop off the infant and a note for his father. He then heads back out into the unknown, alone. This both continues the coming-of-age thread at the beginning of the film, when Spike makes his first trip to the infected-heavy mainland with his father, and rejects it, via Spike not just dabbling in zombieland for some real-life target practice, but deciding to actually explore the country at length. He has prioritized a less regimented, prescribed life over the ritual and safety that he’s known, having accepted (at least to some degree) the role of death in life itself, through the loss of his mother.
Then a bunch of chavs called Jimmy show up.
The final scene of 28 Years Later actually picks up from its opening, set during the original rage outbreak, where a young lad named Jimmy escapes the zombies as his vicar father welcomes them, seeing the hordes as a harbinger of end times. Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Jamie is close enough to a homophone of “Jimmy” to maybe mistake him as the grownup version of that survivor, but no: an adult version of the real and now tracksuited Jimmy (Jack O’Connell, who also played an interloper in Sinners) pops up to save Spike from another group of zombies. He’s commanding a mini-army of imitators and seeming acolytes who gleefully, athletically dispatch the infected as if they’ve just run in from a Guy Ritchie movie. Then the movie ends, not exactly on a cliffhanger, but leaving the audience hanging on what’s next for Spike and the Jimmys. This also involves a cultural touchstone most American audiences will miss, making the whole thing seem even more inexplicable: Jimmy and his gang are dressed like Jimmy Savile, a once-ubiquitous British TV presenter posthumously accused of widespread sexual abuse, including of children.
Jimmy Savile died in 2011 and the allegations against him became well-known afterward, which means this Jimmy wouldn’t be aware of his namesake’s crimes. In the world of 28 Years Later, there’s a good chance they never came to light at all. But for 2025 viewers (at least those aware of Savile), the surface goofiness of this sequence gives way to discomfort, and more thoughts about what gets preserved in a fallen world. Is this apparent religious cult formed around the image of a Top of the Pops host a grim joke on the accidental whitewashings of history, or are there more sinister parallels to be mined? Alongside that question, there’s also some bonus confusion: the lead character of 28 Days Later, played by Cillian Murphy and unaccounted for in this film (and supposedly a lead in the as-yet-unfunded third film) is also named Jim.
What’s next?
Well, Guy Ritchie hasn’t directed 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple – and neither has Boyle. Nia DaCosta, who made the 2021 Candyman reboot as well as The Marvels and Little Woods, directed the already-filmed Garland-penned sequel, which is supposedly out in January (though sometimes ultra-short-gap sequels wind up pushed around the schedule, fearful of going out too soon). Its subtitle refers to something that’s already been unveiled: Dr Kelson’s monument, which the movie seems to have left behind as Spike makes his way in the world. The second film could well circle back to follow Dr Kelson, and leave the Jimmys for whatever Garland and Boyle have planned for the third movie with Murphy; that would certainly fit the new movie’s repeated narrative swerves refocusing the who/what/where/when of survival. But Boyle and Garland have said that the Jimmys sequence does set up the second movie, and that Murphy will appear in a similar capacity to set up the third, so it’s fair to assume Spike will remain the lead character for that installment. (This would make him, and whoever joins him, the first 28 Days Later series character to really carry over, as Days, Weeks and Years all followed different groups of people.) Maybe the Bone Temple is more of a symbolic reference than a literal one, referring to how Spike carries awareness of the dead with him on his journey, which seems like a pointed contrast to the uniform joviality of the Jimmys. One thing is clear: Boyle and Garland have set up a sequel not by obviously holding over-many characters and stories back for another movie, but by overflowing this post-apocalyptic world with ideas.