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When I think about Danny Boyle’s original 28 Days Later, which came out in 2002, I think of it as a film released at a moment in time that now feels like the beginning of a historical arc. The emptied-out streets of London, the feeling of a man who had fallen into a coma in one world to wake up in a completely different one, resonates with the radical change in world politics after 9/11. In the world of the film, only 28 days have passed, but in that period, civilisation has broken down. The most shocking part of the film isn’t the zombies, but the soldiers who have been promised by their leader that civilisation will be restored through the violent acquisition of women – “I promised them women” is the ultimate statement to showcase that it matters how we survive, not just if. The least believable thing about it now is that this pandemic of the rage virus was contained to the UK, that a global quarantine on the island has limited the spread, so that history there has stopped while it continued elsewhere. In that sense, it’s hard not to take 28 Years Later as a film that chronicles the intervening years in our actual timeline as well.
It begins on day zero, with a scene that only makes sense of the end, with a young boy experiencing the initial outbreak of the plague: his whole family is slaughtered, and his father, a priest, welcomes it as if it is the fulfilment of something he has read in the Bible. As the violent herd consumes him, he is exulted, but his son escapes only to return at the end of the film as Spike’s saviour. I am guessing we will find out much more about this in the future films planned, and for now Jimmy’s identity and the community he has built with others is an enigma (all also named Jimmy, all copying the looks of Jimmy Savile, media personality and paedophile, but only revealed in 2012, years after the apocalypse of the film happened), so that whatever answers we gleam from it are speculation and interpretation. This second option of a chosen community the film presents is, from what we’ve seen so far, in contrast with the island’s, which is modelled on an (imaginary) ethnically homogeneous England of the 1950s. The men on the island fight with bows and arrows, like the historical film clips the film uses throughout the beginning – inspired by an imagined heroic past - whereas this group uses martial arts to fight zombies, conscious of individual flair. They wear tracksuits and jewellery, graffiti the walls where they have been, deliberately mimicking something that would have been seen as a cultural threat. Jimmy himself has inverted the cross that his father has given him. At the very least, there are two very different imaginations of England at play here, both boiled down to the essential core of caricature and performance.
The film takes place in a very limited geographic space. There’s Holy Island in Northumbria, a small island off the coast that is only connected with a narrow land bridge to the mainland in low tide. In terms of defensibility, it feels like an ideal spot for the community of survivors that have made a home there, but the striking thing about it is that it doesn’t look like a place that got stuck in 2002: instead, it’s as if the short journey across the water entails time travel to the 1950s, to an England of the distant past. The ethnically homogeneous group (it works as a weird echo to the opening scene with Jimmy’s many siblings, past and present, all incredibly blonde) gathers in a hall that features a portrait of Queen Elizabeth in the earliest years of her reign, and the more we see of their rituals, the eerier they become. There are odd, folkish masks, hinting at a newly emerged religion that isn’t further explained. There are alcohol-fuelled parties that are filmed in a way that makes the participants look and sound like a horde not unlike the zombies on the mainland. It creates a sense of threat and insecurity, a sense of alienation that feels as if much more than only 28 years have passed, or as if time has passed the wrong way, like the apocalypse and the loss of technology has reverted the community back to an earlier stage in English history. It isn’t a radically new idea that one of the results of a (zombie) apocalypse could lead to the emergence of new cults, but what makes this one so scary is that the viewer has to extrapolate so much from very little information, and that imagination has to fill the holes because Boyle isn’t interested in giving us an anthropological tour. Instead, along with the camera, we’re right in the middle of it with Spike (Alfie Williams), our 12-year-old protagonist, who has never known a different world than this one.
Spike is about to undergo what feels like it is a ritual in this community: he will cross the bridge to the mainland to “get his first kill” with his father. He is only twelve, but has been taught how to use a bow-and-arrow for this purpose, has been drilled in military manoeuvre. The existence of this ritual reveals much about what kind of society this is exactly, because it appears to have no greater purpose behind it except to prove that he is becoming a man: Spike’s father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, unrecognisable under a beard), gives him a tour of the great land beyond in which, unimaginably, you can walk so far that you stop seeing the sea, and the only hint that this land has any meaning to the people of the island at all is an area where all the trees have been cut for fuel (an image that is powerful in and of itself, as if the only purpose of this land is the extract resources in a manner that resembles past destruction of woodlands). The kill serves no purpose but to bloody Spike: they target what looks like a family of slow zombies who are grazing for worms in the soil, as far from the horrifying aggression and pace of the original threats of the first film as could be. They are not aggressive, they only fight back when targeted, their appearance is a reminder of the old zombie-film conundrum about how far removed something has to be from human before it can be identified as a monster and be regarded as something that can be killed without moral implications. The ritual is meant for Spike to prove that he is part of the community, but instead this whole journey functions for him as an awakening of sorts to reality: the first kill doesn’t feel heroic at all, and what follows is a very narrow escape from death that opens the question of why his own father should have pushed him to go in the first place, if it is so easy to die out there against the overwhelming odds of swarming zombies and the newly emerged, much smarter Alphas. He also spots a fire in the distance, proof of other human life out there, that Jamie is unwilling to explain to him.
Spike is in essence a character raised by a cult, limited in his knowledge about the world by an insular community. His mother (a great Jodie Comer) is suffering from a mysterious disease (mysterious, because none of the characters who were once alive in a whole different world are willing to explain it to him) that leaves her hallucinating, in agonising pain, unstuck in time. His father eventually does tell him that the fire he saw was the home of a doctor who lives on the mainland – there are, for some reason, only 28 years later, no doctors left in this community, and so this man becomes for Spike a final hope to save his mother, especially after he loses all trust in his father when he watches him have sex with another woman. It feeds into Spike’s suspicion that Jamie has limited care about what happens to Isla, that he is already planning for a life without her, especially after he finds out that there is a potential cure out there, so tantalisingly close. Instead of seeking out this help for his wife, Jamie is following the community’s taboo about Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who was once observed from a distance doing something inexplicable and therefore horrible with the bodies of the dead.
Alienated from his father, or thrown into a position of having to question everything he has taken for granted, Spike sets out with Isla to see Dr Kelson and find a cure. Spike’s transformation as portrayed in the film is powerful: he returns to celebrations of his bravery that his father plays into, telling the great story of their heroism, but it is at odds what he experienced out there. It feels like a lie, and that lie translates into questions about the community itself (I would ask why there has been no previous attempt to connect to the last remaining medical doctor, who would surely be essential for a community to have, why technology has disappeared so utterly and completely, what exactly the education and culture of this island is like, what exactly has been replaced by the hinted at folk religion). This second journey is radically different from the first, because now Spike is travelling with a woman who regularly falls out of time: seeing the Angel of the North reminds her of the past, of seeing the statue with her father, and she thinks about permanence and history, about the impossibility of nailing down time now that everything else is impermanent except what is in front of her. She mistakes Spike for her father. She is sometimes lucid, at one point lucid enough to save her son’s life, but as a character she feels like a personification of a story where time and memory (or history, as remembered and written by humans) are slippery. They meet a young Swedish soldier who has become stranded after his quarantine patrol ship has sunk off the coast and with his stories about the internet (and plastic surgery) he might as well be a mystical creature, a time-traveller from the future who only becomes truly real when he dies gruesomely at the hands of an Alpha. Before that, they all witness the birth of a human child from a zombie mother, an incredible reminder that zombies were once us. The baby, now named Isla after his mother, will be returned to the island, but Spike will never go back.
When Isla and Spike find Dr Kelson, the film flips again. Other critics have compared this journey to a search for the Holy Grail – Spike is trying to find a cure for his mother, and the Holy Grail promises healing powers and eternal youth. I was reminded of Hesse’s Narcissus und Goldmund, a tale about the search for meaning through a landscape ravaged by the plague, and how it tackles the importance of art and love even in times of great destruction.
What they find, once they enter Kelson’s domain, is almost overwhelming in scale and ambition, and one of the most memorable images I’ve seen committed to film in a long time. Kelson’s life-defining project of Memento Mori (an idea that emerged alongside the Black Death) is a monument to humanity as much as it is a reminder of death. He has taken the bodies of the dead – human and zombie alike – and boiled them down into bones, to create towering structures with them, built an awesome (in the original sense of the word) ossuary, by himself, driven only by the intention of remembrance. Each of the skulls once contained the thoughts of a person. Each one stands for an entire life lived. Most importantly, human and zombies look exactly the same once reduced to bones, which is a powerful statement to make in a film where zombies are killed – not just for survival, but also for ritual, as we’ve just witnessed – without hesitation, as if they were prey animals rather than like they once were human. The distinction falls away: there is barely any of the other great caveat of zombie movies here, where frequently characters must kill zombies who were once people they knew and loved. Kelson’s intent is to remember both equally, because both are part of humanity, and pretending otherwise dehumanises not just the zombies but also the remaining humans. Kelson, 28 years later, lives alongside zombies, has accepted them as an unavoidable reality, and he is grieving the dead through these burial rites, without even the comfort of a single other person ever having asked him about his project – until Alfie and Isla come along. It made me think about the impossibility of reckoning with death at scale, the unbearable task of thinking about the dead as individual lives when they are counted in casualty numbers, in war and natural disaster and plague. This is Kelson’s attempt to reckon with it, and therefore that of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland, the script writer. I can’t think of a more poignant image for this time.
Kelson can’t save Isla. He diagnoses her with the brain cancer that both we as the viewers and she herself as a person who was alive before the end of the world have already guessed as a diagnosis. He can save her in the sense of remembering her death, giving her meaning, immortalising her. Spike leaves her skull at the top of the tower, facing the sun. Kelson leaves him with Memento Amoris – remember you must love.
2025, directed by Danny Boyle, starring Alfie Williams, Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes, Aaron Taylor-Johnson.
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