28 Years Later (2025)

Watched 6/19/25 (theater)

2025 has been a trip down memory lane for horror movies, with several big-name creatives confronting some of the genre’s most historic creatures. Leigh Whannell, a personal dark-horse favorite of mine whose strength lies in kinetic action sequences, put out a new Wolfman feature rife with compelling new ideas but sans any propulsion or fun whatsoever, quickly meandering into dullness. Then came Sinners, written and directed by Ryan Coogler, a shot right to the ripe neck of vampire movies, setting itself apart through vividly-drawn characters, a sense of humor, and blues music.

With 28 Years Later, the original 28 Days Later team of director Danny Boyle and Alex Garland get back together to put a 2025 spin on the zombie movie, a genre that has been done to death this century even more than vampires or werewolves. After Boyle and Garland’s 2002 now-classic broke into the mainstream, everything from Western blockbusters like The Walking Dead or World War Z, to Eastern pleasures such as Train to Busan, began cribbing from its fast-zombie approach. The results have been mixed, with some finding slight nuances to add or new shades to color in. But it certainly didn’t feel like there was that much left to do in this genre that we haven’t seen by now.

And here we are in a post-coronavirus world, so I was fully prepared to love this movie, but also fully prepared to be annoyed with it and all of its allegorical muchness should it turn out to be handled lazily. That laziness was very much not the case. Garland’s script is so warped and anti-formulaic, so clear in its themes, so unpretentious about its subtext, and so refusing to bow to recent blockbuster pitfalls. Boyle’s direction is revelatory, showcasing his ability to pioneer in ways so head-scratchingly fresh, it recalls the drastic, manic excitement of Trainspotting and how he found ways to open our eyes to a whole new world almost 30 years ago, that time breaking ground with this hyper-stylized, live-action cartoon filmmaking that so many have aped since.

Speaking of 30 years ago, 28 Years opens with a flashback to day zero of the franchise’s infection, and it immediately sets the bar way high for the hellish violence and colorful filmmaking tricks that will rear their heads throughout the film. A young boy watches as his sisters and mother are mercilessly killed by zombies before running to the church where his father works as a priest. His father gives him a rosary to remember him by before distracting the zombies and allowing his son to hide. It’s of course all done a disservice by just writing about it in a review—what’s actually onscreen features haunting clashes between children’s television and blood-curdling screams, high-adrenaline running and a mother’s breaking heart, as well as a priest’s last stand punctuated by a twisted sense of happiness that judgement day is upon him. It’s fucking disturbing, and it’s set to the first of many original pop songs done for the film by the group Young Fathers. They are truly an exceptional supplement to this movie and honestly they steal the show at times. This montage immediately establishes the stakes of the movie, sets up a character for the end of the story, and highlights Danny Boyle’s unquestionable skill and creative juice when music is involved.

28 Years Later… The original movie focused on Cillian Murphy’s Jim, a 20-something recently dropped out of a coma and dropped into a hellscape of barren, infected London before biting off a chunk of rural military horror. Its sequel…well…the less said the better… This third entry in the series, and the first of a planned new trilogy, concerns a future where the UK has been quarantined, so of course the rage-monsters/zombies are still running amok. In the country by the sea, a small causeway (a natural bridge of sorts that disappears at high tide) connects to a humble, walled-in island of farmers, seamstresses, soldiers, and all of the other tradesmen one would need in the event of a reset back to medieval ways. They’ve been kept in this country for 28 years, so technology is all but gone, with the most advanced systems functioning being bows, arrows, showers, and frisbees.

All of this world-building is done through another terrific montage sequence, the second of many set to another Young Fathers song as our main character, 12-year-old boy Spike (rookie Alfie Williams in a performance that is a new gold standard for kid actors…amazing), is woken up by his father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson finally finding a scallawag part that’s just right for him…and still complex!), and wrestled out of bed for the most important day of his life. The upbeat music speaks to the immediacy of the day as Spike must go to the mainland with his father to earn his first zombie kill (yes it’s as bizarre as it sounds), but the music even more so is what elevates this film into the pop art category instead of being just another b-movie with some a-ideas. Boyle’s talents have always been tied to a flair for audio, but if you take away one thing from this review, it’s that—1. Alfie Williams rocks. And 2. Boyle’s montage ability in this movie and the songs he chooses to put over those montages are infectious and daring on a level that I hope and think means this film could live on as a touchstone of 2000s-2020s filmmaking when people look back however many decades from now. It just feels so artistically evocative of and maybe even transcendent of this era in a way that so many anonymous modern blockbusters don’t, with those lesser movies having songs you’ve heard fifty times on a Spotify algorithm so stale, you’re actively embarrassed that you’re listening.

After establishing Spike’s relationship with his hard-charging-but-loving father and mysterious-but-kind mother (Jodie Comer), Spike and his father Jamie journey out of the island fort and into the open mainland, and this is where the movie accelerates into the fast lane. If montage work could be this good in every movie, I would probably give every bad movie a passing grade. The amount Boyle is able to do with unnatural, jarring camera movements and idiosynchratic song choices is unfathomably effective at building this uniquely distopian mood. That Kipling radio recording from the trailer is mixed with more Young Fathers music here as they begin exploring, and it’s so aggressive and labored that you almost think it is going to get annoying, but the eeriness is just too intriguing to resist. If you didn’t know before that this movie wasn’t fucking around, you’d know now. There are infrared shots of zombies eating deer and cracking spinal cords—wild.

The rest of the movie is difficult to write about plot-wise, as so much of it hinges on your existing expectations and Garland subverting them. It’s better to go in as blind as possible in that respect. And with that, a moment on Alex Garland. The guy wrote 28 Days Later, wrote Sunshine, wrote and ghost-directed Dredd before writing and directing now Ex Machina, Annihilation, Devs, Men, Civil War, and Warfare. He announced a step back from directing seemingly to write this new 28 Years trilogy, but has also now attached himself to write and direct a video game adaptation of the Elden Ring variety.

The longworking Brit’s career is a strange, addictively entertaining career, especially with how different each of his screenplays are. I could talk all day about how Garland’s directing has leveled up over the years, but he doesn’t direct 28 Years Later. He simply provides one of the most idiosynchratic and thrilling blockbuster scripts in years. If the sequels can be anything like this one, completely doused in thematically astute character work and breakneck pulp action (the only two things I care about sometimes), I will continue to be a paying customer. This script has the sparseness of dialogue and lack of overlapping complexities that his more recent films like Civll War and Warfare mirrored, but also dips back into video-gamey action pleasures akin to Dredd and 28 Days. It’s a wholly straightforward, clear, and somehow also totally unexpected journey. Somehow it feels like Alex Garland has avoided studio notes on his scripts for almost his entire career, and this screenplay continues that streak.

I would be remiss not to bring the action craftwork into the conversation because it is as vital to the success of this film as anything. While the montage work is the most Danny Boyle of all of this film’s victories, the most unprecedented innovation is the video-game inspired zombie kills. We’ve all seen the social media posts presenting the film crew’s 180-degree iphone rigs, but we didn’t know exactly what they were going to do until the final product began showing in theaters. Now, witnessing headshot after headshot in this surreal mishmash of Snyder slo-mo and Bay quick-cuts, we get to speculate whose idea this was. And while I attribute the montage work solely to Boyle, this “killcam” step forward in big-budget viscera is something I believe belongs largely to the mind and/or influence of one Alex Garland given his background and interests. He and Boyle really seem to bring out great things in each other.

On the topic of games, this movie closes with a weird, we’ll call it “delivery” decision by main character Spike after so many understandable, well-motivated, and logical decisions earlier on. That irked me a bit but I was willing to roll with it because of how enjoyable the rest of the movie was. And right before there there’s a commendably twisty death that holds some earned emotional and philosophical weight while also making some earlier setups seem wasted. Then the floor falls out as you are introduced to what is almost certainly the villain of the next movie right before the end-credits hit. This sequence is so different from the rest of the movie in tone, and so different in combat choreography and shot selection from any of the other movies, that it almost feels like 28 Years is cheating and breaking some of its own rules. I actually found it kind of stimulating and unsettling just because of how out of left field it was. But really, my thoughts on this scene, my score for this movie, and my willingness to return to this franchise for rewatches depend on the next movie, which is written again by Garland but will not be directed by Danny Boyle.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple will premier in 2026 and will be directed by Nia DaCosta. Nia DaCosta made what I thought was a very stupid, very unsubtle, very clueless Candyman movie. And then she also helmed The Marvels, which had a trailer that gave me secondhand embarrassment. I can’t say anything for that movie itself because I haven’t seen it yet. I will now of course seek it out in anticipation of her 28 Years sequel, but my confidence is obviously not high. 28 Days and 28 Years are both so uncompromisingly British, in the world, humor, relationships, etc. Nia DaCosta is not British.

Now, to leave this on a positive note, I have been known to absolutely love sequels that take such tonal and subjective departures from their preceding franchise entry. Hell, that’s a lot of why I loved this new 28 Years so much in conversation with 28 Days, a movie I also really dig. To give 28 Years a near-perfect score, it would really depend how the rest of this sequel trilogy shakes out. There’s just too much plot still in the air—this is not a standalone film no matter how much the filmmakers want you to believe it is. But the tone evolves throughout and the third act really sets up this almost bizarrely theatrical, Arthurian, Sherwood Forest-ian vibe for the immediate future. If Nia DaCosta can build on that for this penultimate entry and then handoff back to Boyle for the capper, we could be looking down the barrel of a franchise to revisit and cherish for more than 28 years to come.

9.25/10