In 28 Years Later — the third installment in the 28 Years franchise after 2002’s 28 Days Later and 2007’s 28 Weeks Later — director Danny Boyle seeks to move beyond the clichés of the zombie genre.

The film centers around the struggle of 12-year-old Spike (Alex Williams), who is raised in the isolated community of Lindisfarne, “Holy Island,” off the coast of Britain. Lindisfarne is a real place with a fitting history. British Christianity built a veritable fortress of evangelizing monks there while most Celts and Anglo-Saxons remained pagan. 

In this future world, the mainland has entirely fallen to the “infected.” In spite of Britain’s downfall, Holy Island stands strong. There, no virtues are greater than patriotism and hard work. A select few make the dangerous trip to the mainland to forage for supplies and pick off the infected.

The typical age for a journey to zombie-infested Britain is 14, but Spike’s father, a forager par excellence, decides to take him to the mainland at the age of 12 against his mother’s wishes. After narrowly surviving, Spike makes the fateful decision to return in an attempt to save his mother’s life. 

This second journey is the centerpiece of the film. Spike runs into a Swedish sailor who, before being brutally mauled, reveals that the rest of the world is functioning as normal aside from a quarantine around Britain. Spike and his increasingly unwell mother are then saved from certain death. 

Their savior turns out to be the man they were looking for: the last doctor in Britain. Contrary to rumors that he had gone insane, he is able to diagnose her with terminal cancer and console Spike through her death. 

To this viewer, the film comes across as a moving portrait of Anglo-Saxon success, a ballad in honor of a resilient nation. However, most reviews praised the film as an apt skewer to the British Right amidst the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. 

According to such observers as the British Independent, 28 Years Later responds to the rising tides of “nationalism, isolationism, and weaponised culture.” Upon an examination of Danny Boyle’s consistently left-wing political views, the intent to mock nationalism seems clear. 

Despite directorial intent, the film’s depiction of the English identity is something of a political Rorschach test. The intended subtext of an anti-nationalist critique is entirely absent if viewers do not subscribe to the director’s leftist politics. 

Viewing a scene depicting islanders celebrating beneath the English cross and a portrait of the queen, another reviewer saw “islanders little better than the infected.” Viewers of like mind to mine are more likely to see a hearty and deserved celebration of the same English spirit that carried everyday men, women, and children from the Napoleonic Wars to the Nazis’ barrage of bombs.

The tone of the film is distinctly English in character. With no more advanced weaponry than bows at our heroes’ disposal, scenes often cut to Medieval archers at war with France. The English flag flies high over their island home. Spike and his mother take refuge in an Anglican chapel with a carved bust seemingly of King Arthur poised above.

It seems the only people who have survived the zombie apocalypse are British patriots who love Queen Elizabeth II, the Union Jack, and folk singing. Though the director may have had other intentions, one can almost see the spirit of Lady Britannia over Spike as he evades death-by-zombie as surely as the poets would have you believe it protected the men at Plassey and Waterloo.

As the journey to the mainland is made, interspliced with clips of the World War II-era patriotic film Henry V and a reading of a Rudyard Kipling poem, Spike is metaphorically crowned as an heir to the brave history of England. There is nothing sinister lurking beneath any of this, even if the director and others of his political bent might object to the shows of glory.

If there was one distinct characteristic in the Anglo-Protestantism of the British Empire, it was its particular sort of missionary zeal. The British saw themselves as an empire of liberty, entering the most desolate corners of the earth to establish outposts of civilization, democracy, and development. 

This ethos seems laced throughout the island community of 28 Years Later, where a (literal) island of tranquility stands firm against a murderous and dangerous mainland. One is reminded of Shakespeare’s poetic ruminations on England in Richard II as “This other Eden, demi-paradise/This fortress built by Nature for herself/Against infection and the hand of war.”

In technical terms, the film’s most noticeable fault is simply that it neglects the importance of silence as the central tool of horror. Music plays where it has no need to, distracting from scenes that display genuine emotion. Yet, 28 Years Later is remarkable, in the end, as a piece about a 12-year-old begging for his mother’s life coming to terms with the reality of death. 

The film ends with an entirely different tone. A set of thugs dressed as ninjas dispatch a cohort of zombies and offer to take the 12-year-old under their wing. The film then concludes as it is revealed that this group is led by “Jimmy,” the name of a child given to hoards of zombies in an otherwise standalone opening scene set 28 years ago.

Their dress is laden with the soulless popular culture of modern Britain, and the name “Jimmy” is an intentional reference to Jimmy Savile, Britain’s most famous man until he was unmasked as a mass sexual abuser. If Holy Island embodies the strength of the old British spirit, the cult that the film concludes with epitomizes the vapidness of today’s post-national nation.

28 Years Later was shot alongside its upcoming sequel, The Bone Temple. Thus, we will not know the fate of our young warrior until January 2026. In the meantime, however, the zombie film is easily the best in a decade and well worth watching. Come for the living dead, stay for the moving portrait of familial love, community toil, and the British soul.