In 2003, director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland introduced the concept of fast zombies to popular culture with their apocalypse film 28 Days Later. In 2025, I have finally forgiven them for it.
28 Years Later comes 23 years after the release of 28 Days Later. If you’re confused by the titling format, just know that the movies went from 28 Weeks Later straight to 28 Years Later, skipping months entirely. I maintain this confusion is a feature and not a bug, for the latest iteration is less interested in zombies and far more interested in another lumbering, unstoppable menace: time.
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As the title promises, the film takes place 28 years after the outbreak of the Rage virus in the British Isles. It’s a disease that shuts off all logic and heightens all aggression, turning infected people into mindless husks that kill at the slightest provocation. Think of Philadelphia sports fans and you get the idea. Continental Europe has beaten back the virus on its shores and quarantined the British Isles to prevent outbreaks, with French ships circling the waters to prevent any uninfected people still left from leaving. (It seems that even in this alternate timeline, the Brits managed to achieve Brexit, albeit against their will.)
Locked out from the rest of the world, the surviving Brits have no choice but to retreat into themselves. A community has sprouted up on the island of Lindisfarne, connected to the mainland but protected from it by a long causeway that is swallowed up at every high tide. It is also known as the Holy Island for its association with St. Cuthbert, whom legend holds could commune with ravens and remained incorrupt after death. Throughout the film, flocks of ravens precede the undead, which, depending on viewers’ perspectives, either herald them or warn the humans.
The island is ringed with wooden spikes and an armed guard of archers, with Boyle helpfully splicing in clips of Agincourt during a training montage for those of us still too dense to get it. Viewers sense that the islanders resort to such tactics out of both necessity and self-image, harkening to legend so as not to admit their diminished state.
The only spike not on the walls is our protagonist. Spike (Alfie Williams) is 12 years old and gearing up for an island tradition, in which he and his father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), are allowed to leave the island to collect Spike’s first zombie kill. His mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), is bedridden with an unknown illness, with no doctor to diagnose her and no Web MD to convince everyone that she has the bubonic plague. Isla’s delirium gives her a loose grasp on the present, often slipping into the past to hold conversations from 20 years prior. Her son and her husband play along, one out of hope and the other out of resignation.
As someone who sees too many films, to the detriment of his love life and sanity, I appreciate that 28 Years Later has little interest in traditional structure, pulling the rug so often you don’t even realize it’s made its way back around the room. You first assume that the movie will cover the traditional Bildungsroman, with Spike becoming a man under his father’s tutelage. But Boyle and Garland understand that no one really turns into an adult; you just find out that adults are children with experience. What’s true for history is also true for its authors: time is a perpetual now to which we add chapterheads in the illusion of progress. Jamie is a brave man who is in some ways just a scared little boy, and Spike is a scared little boy who finds himself a scared little man when he steps up for his mother when his father can’t.
Spike’s journey from the island through the zombie mainland is through time as well as space. It’s a voyage through Britain’s past, there and back again in both the literal and Tolkienian sense. He starts in the High Middle Ages, encounters a crew of marauding Vikings (Swedish NATO soldiers shipwrecked off the coast), walks along Hadrian’s Wall, and at the end of it, encounters a man all doused up in body paint like a Celt. Viewers understand in real time why the Romans got one look and decided to leave Scotland well enough alone.
THE EPIC, CHARLTON HESTON, AND THE SMALLNESS OF HOLLYWOOD
It’s not just ancient history: There are Teletubbies, frisbees, the decidedly complicated legacy of Jimmy Savile, all the detritus that piles up and gains value with enough dust. The adults cling to these last happy memories, but Spike was born after the apocalypse and has no context for any of it. To him, the past is a level playing field, a single unified “Before” that he sifts for meaning at his discretion. But, then, the death of every generation is a minor apocalypse. We mimic Spike in taking in the collective works of mankind and keeping what remains relevant.
28 Years Later is relevant without the curse of topicality, universal for owning its weirdness, and incorruptible like Cuthbert because it understands that nothing really changes. Be it zombies, saints, or the general ebb of humanity, death can’t stop life from just raging on with it.
Joe Joyce is a writer in Los Angeles.