28 Years Later (2025)

28 Years Later: A Triumphant Return | 4/5

Written by Noah Dietz: 6/28/2025

It’s new, it’s out, you’ve all heard this a million times already, but I’m happy to say that 28 Years Later is more than I expected, and almost everything I hoped for. We’ve done away with a gigantic, blown out story like we got in Weeks and brought it back to what’s important: the people.

The realization that we had decided to primarily do away with even most of the events of the second film hit me very quickly. After a quick opening scene set at the inception of the infection, we jump out the titular 28 years with a narration over a combination of historical footage and moments pulled from the other films. The quarantine worked, England is blockaded, and the rage virus has been sealed away from the rest of the world. In fact, there are some areas within the boundaries of the blockade that the virus seems to have been removed from, such as the small village on Holy Island. This area serves as the primary set piece for our first thirty or so minutes, protected from the mainland by a small land bridge that is only available at low tide. A borderline perfect sanctuary, on paper.

Unfortunately, nothing in life is perfect, much less in this setting.

Spike (Alfie Williams) and his dad, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), are about to embark on a sort of ritual. Prove you’re a man, go kill an infected on the mainland. Spike seems to be excited, though his mother’s mysterious illness is a looming cloud over breakfast. Isla (Jodie Comer) doesn’t want her son to go out, though she doesn’t have the strength to actually stop them. A quick lie to settle her concerns, and Spike leaves with Jamie to make his way across the bridge into the future. While out in the wilderness that’s taken over a majority of Great Britain, Spike does see a fire in the distance. This sets up for our second and third act quest of bringing his mother to the man who set it, Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes).

I love how naturally we move through the story. As Spike goes through the traditions of becoming an adult, we get to see his world change before his eyes. One day he’s simply Spike the child, the boy about to go on his journey. The next morning? He’s Spike, the boy who has to move to the stage of taking care of his parents decades before any child should. We see the relative innocence of the safe island home taken away from him in the blink of an eye, shoving him into an even worse part of a world he already knew was hard.

As we travel across the English countryside on our way to find the doctor, it’s not too hard to piece together what’s likely happening to Isla. In fact, when we finally meet Dr. Kelson it’s more a confirmation of what we already knew to be true than anything else. What I didn’t expect to see, however, was a touching conversation about the inevitability of death and how it’s not always a bad thing. The memento mori of Kelson’s bone field has a haunting stillness to it, a quiet beauty in the middle of the mass tragedy of the rage virus. It’s truly aspirational that, while some of the worst of us would revel in a world that lacks order, some would come together to make an honest attempt at honoring those who have passed. The conversation that follows came home especially hard for me. We can leave on our own terms, or as close to them as we can, and it doesn’t have to be a bad thing. The end of the cycle of life, when you allow yourself to step back, can be a beautiful moment. It doesn’t mean it’s not awful and painful, but the beauty in the moment can still be found if you take the moment to look for it.

The camera rig used for certain close up shots (Photo by Miya Mizuno/Sony Pictures via AP)

On a technical front, this film is also a wonder to behold. I’m sure most people interested in the film have already seen the platform covered in cameras capturing some of the more dramatic close shots. Much in the spirit of the original, these spikes of slightly lower quality footage lend a strange level of intimacy to the moments, leaving you too close to the action for comfort. Frequent collaborator Anthony Dod Mantle returned as Boyle’s cinematographer, which helped us return to a great deal of the atmosphere of 28 Days Later. The crust, the pent-up anger, and a film with a statement to make lay themselves out in front of you, daring you to meet it on its own terms.

The beautiful landscape in this film also can’t be overstated, and the care put into the details of what would be in place is fantastic. In an interview with Brandon Streussnig for Letterboxd, Danny Boyle talks about elements of this.

“The scene in the train in 28 Years Later is really important, the fact it happens in a train. They wanted me to have this dodgy little tram train, and I said, ‘We’ve got to have a proper train.’ We started to look into finding old trains, because, of course, these are trains that existed 28 years ago. Most of the big trains now are less than 28 years old, so, of course, they wouldn’t live in our universe, which stopped 28 years ago.”

Obviously this type of detail is something that’s important for a majority of films, but having Boyle back in the driver’s seat lends a comfort in the knowledge that, as the original creator, he still has his finger on the pulse of what’s going on in his world.

As a friend of mine said, there are some Boyle-isms in this, both the good and the bad. If you don’t like what he brings to the table, this might not land for you. That being said, what we have here is still one of the best horror legacy sequels we’ve gotten in the past decade. Despite my distaste for much of Alex Garland’s recent work, he and Boyle truly came back together for this in full form. I find myself excited to see what the two of them do in the third film. While I have found a good portion of Garland’s work to be a little frustrating, his working with Boyle here brings back almost every good feeling I had about the first film in addition to some new ones.

Love it or hate it, in my opinion this is the definitive 28 Days Later sequel we’ve been waiting for. My reservations about the two announced sequels have been cautiously put to bed, and I wait eagerly for Nia DaCosta’s upcoming sequel, The Bone Temple.