28 Years Later

While promoting his new film, 28 Years Later, director Danny Boyle expressed retrospective reservations about Slumdog Millionaire. By far his most successful movie, it delivered the box office performance of a Marvel blockbuster and won him the prestigious Best Director Oscar. Boyle was already famous thanks to his boundary-pushing past work, but he wasn’t Bollywood famous. And yet, while reflecting on Slumdog a decade-and-a-half later, he declared that he would never make something like it again; instead, he said, he would appoint a young Indian director at the helm. It seems like Boyle, who also spearheaded the opening ceremony for the London Olympics, has developed an acute case of ‘white guilt’. This guilt can be felt in every frame of 28 Years Later.

Danny Boyle’s 2002 film 28 Days Later is widely considered one of the most influential entries in the zombie genre. By stripping out the supernatural and replacing it with a scientifically plausible viral outbreak, Boyle gave the genre a visceral realism. Now, in 28 Years Later (2025), Boyle reengages the genre with his trademark jittery digital aesthetic, matched by Alex Garland’s bleak yet poetic screenplay. (28 Weeks Later, the 2007 sequel was directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, but this new instalment brings the original team back into play.) 28 Years Later isn’t just a sequel; it’s a resurrection—a smart, stylish, and often brutal return to a world that reshaped zombie cinema back in 2002. The post-apocalyptic UK remains in indefinite quarantine, its landscape overrun by the infected. Small uninfected communities survive in isolation. One such pocket is a tiny island off the coast of Scotland, cut off from the mainland and clinging to normalcy. Garland’s script focuses on one family: Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), his ailing wife Isla (Jodie Comer), and their 12-year-old son Spike (Alfie Williams).

One tends to forget how formal and dull a majority of mainstream filmmaking has become until a true-blue swashbuckling director comes along and destroys our notions of what films should look like. It happened to me during the opening stretch of Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later, which begins with a strange corner-angle shot (by Boyle’s regular, Anthony Dod Mantle) showing a bunch of children, cramped into one room, watching an episode of Teletubbies. The handy cam aesthetic paints dread into the visual – as does the commotion outside as we hear elders scream at each other. And suddenly the door breaks, and in classic Boyle fashion, we’re racing through narrow hallways, to open fields with the “infected” chasing a young boy called Jimmy. It’s a sublime opening sequence filled with paranoia, thrill and weighty subtext, as Jimmy’s father – a priest praying inside the local church – awaits these undead (zombies), calling it his judgement day.

The zombies have returned following a significant hiatus. Although it did not initially present itself as a zombie series in 2001 with 28 Days Later, it gradually evolved into one. Director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland stepped away from their respective positions for the sequel 28 Weeks Later (2007), but they have returned for 28 Years Later, a stylishly crafted post-apocalyptic thriller.