The 2002 release of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later marked a turning point in the long cinematic tradition of zombie horror. Boyle’s innovation, in collaboration with screenwriter Alex Garland (director of Civil War and Warfare), was to turn the lumbering undead of horror classics like George Romero’s Living Dead series into uncannily fast-moving flesh-eaters infected with a highly contagious pathogen known as the “Rage virus.” At the start of a new century and a then-new digital information age, fast-moving zombies somehow felt right. The world was changing more swiftly than anyone could keep up with, and the lightning speed of the movie’s viscera-chomping antagonists—identified not as zombies but as “the infected”—seemed well suited to what felt like accelerated societal collapse: Over the time span referred to in the film’s title, London is transformed from a bustling metropolis into an eerily silent ruin.

In 2007 came a sequel, 28 Weeks Later, not directed by Boyle or written by Garland but featuring both as producers (and with Boyle directing some second-unit scenes). While not as big a hit or as critically praised as the original, it was a solid continuation of the franchise that became part of a mid-aughts wave of zombie content, including movies (Shaun of the Dead, I Am Legend, Zombieland), bestselling novels (World War Z, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), and comic books (the Walking Dead series, later adapted into multiple TV shows). Now, five years short of 28 years since they first reanimated the zombie tradition, Boyle and Garland have returned with 28 Years Later, a long-overdue follow-up that’s also intended as the first installment of a new trilogy of sequels.

In the post-postapocalyptic world of 28 Years Later, the island of Britain has been cut off entirely from the rest of the world by a strictly enforced quarantine. An island off the Scottish coast, connected to the mainland by a causeway that disappears at high tide, has become a protected stronghold for a community of uninfected survivors. Without electricity or modern technology, the island’s residents live the life of preindustrial villagers, farming, fishing, and coming together for ritual celebrations; their lives would seem downright folksy but for the hordes of flesh-craving monsters kept at bay only by the armed lookouts guarding the island’s coastline.

Among the island’s traditions is a coming-of-age ritual for young men, who must cross over to the mainland to demonstrate their prowess with a bow and arrow by scoring at least one killing of an “infected.” Over the nearly three decades since the virus produced the first of these unfortunate beings, their kind has evolved to include various types; in addition to the hordes of now-familiar speeding zombies, there are supersized mutants known as “alphas,” as well as “slow-and-lows,” fatter creatures that crawl across the ground and subsist on worms when they can’t get access to human flesh. (Cue multiple extreme close-ups of worm-slurping zombies, a signal that the movie to come will seize and run with every opportunity to gross the viewer out.)

As the film begins, island villager Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) accompanies his 12-year-old son, Spike (Alfie Williams), on his rite of passage. The sensitive Spike is terrified by the bloodthirsty creatures he must face, but, eager to please his macho dad, he takes down one of the chubby ground-crawlers, and after a close call with an especially hungry alpha, father and son make it back safely to their island stronghold.

Back at home, Spike’s mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), is bedridden with a mysterious illness—not the Rage virus, but something that’s causing her mind to drift in and out of coherence as her body wastes away. Determined to save her life, Spike sneaks Isla off the island and onto the mainland; he has heard tales of a doctor who has survived the virus and might be able to diagnose his mother’s condition.

On their journey, they encounter not only zombie threats of both the speedy and sluggish variety, but a surly Swedish soldier (Edvin Ryding) who’s been stranded on the mainland after a shipwreck; he represents Spike’s first encounter with a previrus world, bearing with him such novel items as a machine gun and a now-useless cellphone. Eventually, Spike and Isla make it to Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), a confounding figure who paints his body orange with iodine to resist the virus, and who seems to have worked out a manageable if not peaceful coexistence with the infected hordes that surround his lonely compound.

It’s the rare movie that doesn’t get at least 20 percent better when Ralph Fiennes appears, and though his arrival here comes late in the story, his presence brings a sense of moral clarity that briefly lifts this hectic movie into a different, quieter dimension. (Fiennes’ arc also appears to be setting in place some mythology that the next installment, titled 28 Days Later: The Bone Temple, will build on.) And an action movie with a 12-year-old protagonist is a risky proposal, but the 14-year-old actor Alfie Williams is up to the challenge. His performance as the courageous but frightened and at times still childlike Spike is a big part of what grounds 28 Years Later in a recognizable emotional reality, even amid all the guts-gobbling zombies. Acting opposite such powerhouses as Fiennes and the ever-excellent Comer (who makes what could have been a generic damsel-in-distress character into a specific, flawed, and lovable woman), Williams delivers a vivid performance; it’s to be hoped he will return in the next installment, as is implied in this movie’s bizarre but intriguing final moments.

In 2001, 28 Days Later was filmed on the then-unusual format of consumer-grade digital video. 28 Years Later was shot with an even more daring technique, courtesy of the legendary cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, returning with a custom-built rig mounted with up to 20 iPhones simultaneously, allowing for quick cuts among multiple angles on the same image at once. Along with the use of freeze-frames and dramatic canted angles, this editing style, used mainly in the action sequences, makes for a fragmented, music video–style experience with an almost punk-rock sense of immediacy. The effect is at times thrilling but frequently also vaguely nauseating. If you aren’t a fan of experiencing the latter sensation at the movies, I wouldn’t recommend 28 Years Later, a movie that alternates serious dramatic moments with the kind of gleeful half-comedic gore that enthusiasts of the horror genre will delight in, including one scene showing an especially menacing alpha whose weapon of choice is a freshly harvested human head, swung from its still-attached spinal column like a medieval mace on a chain.

Zombie films, more than any other horror genre with the possible exception of the vampire movie, have a way of lending themselves to allegorical readings that incorporate elements from the political and cultural moment when they were made. Night of the Living Dead, the rare horror movie of its time with a Black protagonist, was in part about the ambient racism of the 1960s; Dawn of the Dead, with its mall-invading monsters, was a critique of late-20^th-century consumerism. The first 28 Days movie was conceived before the 9/11 attacks, but its release the year after they happened inevitably made the film feel like a commentary on the new global order, with its paranoid fear of an insidious invading force. 28 Weeks Later, which featured an American-led occupying force attempting to rebuild a decimated Britain, was read by many critics as an allegory for the Iraq war. Coming in the wake of both COVID and Brexit, 28 Years Later, with its vision of an isolated Britain seen as cursed and untouchable by the European mainland, also seems pregnant with symbolic meanings that are, thankfully, never spelled out for the viewer in so many words. There may be deeper, more intangible fears buried beneath this rowdy, raucous thriller’s grody surface—luckily, you won’t have time to stop and ponder them while you’re being chased by a supersized zombie wielding a severed head.

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