‘28 Years Later’ review: Director Danny Boyle returns to lead horror franchise into new territory

Dir: Danny Boyle. UK/US. 2025. 115mins

Practically three a long time after a rage virus was leaked from a bio-weapons lab, mainland Britain is now a chosen quarantine zone the place pockets of survivors exist alongside the hordes of contaminated. Inside this hostile atmosphere, a younger boy learns that survival takes many types. UK director Danny Boyle’s long-awaited return to the franchise he created in 2002 might lack the fast, visceral chunk of his unique 28 Days Later, however however brings a satisfying mixture of outdated horrors and new concepts.

 A satisfying mixture of outdated horrors and new concepts

There’s a lot driving on Boyle’s return, and that of unique screenwriter Alex Garland – not least as a result of that is the primary in a deliberate trilogy, with Nia DaCosta-directed 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (additionally written by Garland) coming in January 2026. And there’s a legacy to uphold: the low-budget 28 Days Later was a shot within the arm for UK horror, making $75m on the international field workplace and changing into a style basic. Sequel 28 Weeks Later (directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo) made $65m in 2005, and this follow-up has been within the works ever since – though delays have seen it evolve from the deliberate ‘28 Months Later’. Made with a a lot greater price range and a solid that features Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer and Ralph Fiennes, 28 Years Later ought to draw the crowds when it rolls out globally from June 18.

Whereas the tip of 28 Weeks Later noticed the fad virus apparently migrate to Paris, right here opening titles state it has been pushed again from continental Europe and the British mainland has been quarantined. Worldwide boat patrols guarantee no contaminated can escape, and that no determined souls could make a bid for security. It’s a gut-punch set-up, which instantly attracts on the collective nightmares of Covid, Brexit and the rise of nationalism.

With a lot time having handed for the reason that occasions of the earlier movies (that are recapped in a brief, sharp opening sequence set in 2002), Boyle, Garland and their inventive workforce are capable of construct their post-apocalyptic imaginative and prescient from the bottom up. The movie just isn’t fuelled by the desperation and panic of the primary two instalments, during which individuals have been trying to return issues to how they all the time had been. This new regular has had time to mattress in, and survivors congregate in remoted communities just like the one on Holy Island (aka Lindisfarne, off the northeast coast of England). Manufacturing designer Gareth Pugh imagines this neighborhood as a vivid mixture of turn-of-the-century bucolic idyll – villagers reside off the land, share assets, take care of one another – and barely cultish survivalist enclave over which the menace of violence casts a everlasting shadow.

Holy Island’s children, like 12-year-old Spike (newcomer Alfie Williams) know no completely different, and it’s with pleasure that he prepares to enterprise throughout the causeway – satisfactory solely at excessive tide – together with his father Jamie (Taylor-Johnson) to go to the mainland and declare his first kill. By way of Spike’s cloistered eyes, northeast England seems an unlimited inexperienced and nice land, lensed in superb, immersive 2.76:1 widescreen by cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle. Elsewhere, motion sequences are shot with iPhones, typically multiples on rigs or connected to the contaminated, pulling the viewer additional into the motion and paying homage to the franchise’s handheld digital origins.

Jamie, nonetheless, is aware of that, magnificence apart, this stays a spot of hazard; as they stroll, Younger Fathers’ intense rating combines with an ardent, altered narration of Rudyard Kipling’s repetitive wartime poem ‘Boots’ to create a daunting, disorienting soundscape. It’s not lengthy earlier than the pair come throughout the contaminated – they, too, have advanced into distinct teams: the unique technology, bare and quick; the Sluggish-Lows, grotesque, bloated, decomposing creatures who slither alongside the bottom; and, most terrifyingly, the Alphas, morphed by the virus into large, super-strong behemoths who assume nothing of wielding a human spinal twine like a whip.

Whereas Spike and Jamie make it again to Holy Island alive – simply – Spike’s worldview has been altered eternally, notably as he begins to lose religion in his father’s judgment. Williams is spectacular as this conflicted teenager, his cautious stability of vulnerability and power grounding this coming-of-age-in-extremis narrative. Taylor-Johnson, too, is sympathetic as a person wrestling with the opposing feelings of protecting his little one protected and getting ready him for the cruel realities of life.

Decided to take issues into his personal arms, Spike brings his critically unwell mom Isla (a wonderful Jodie Comer) throughout the causeway in quest of the mysterious Physician Kelson (Fiennes, in entertaining Coronary heart Of Darkness mode) who’s rumoured to reside on the mainland. Right here, Garland’s selection to make use of an ailing or absent spouse/mom as dramatic motivation for male characters proves a well-recognized frustration, however works inside the context of a franchise that has all the time been skewed in the direction of male survival.

Spike and Isla make it to the physician, helped by stranded Swedish soldier Erik (Edvin Ryding), whose iPhone and tales of the surface world are like an alien language. What they discover takes the franchise into new territory, each thematically – the physician’s towering piles of bones and skulls a dynamic image of this new actuality – and actually, as, along with a coda that introduces the droog-esque character of Jimmy (Jack O’Connell), it lays the groundwork for the subsequent movie. And whereas the franchise has undeniably mutated during the last 23 years, from scrappy guerilla horror to blockbuster tentpole, this stays a compelling dystopian world to which viewers will wish to return.