Coming of age in a time of rage

Alternately dead brilliant and completely kooky, and sometimes — somehow! — both at once, this hugely anticipated threequel in the 28 Days Later series is choppy, erratic and tonally all over the place.

But 28 Years Later, which sees the return of director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting) and writer Alex Garland (Ex Machina), is also ambitious and allusive and packed with important ideas.

This third instalment may fail at certain junctures, but even its failures are interesting.

In 2002, Boyle and Garland delivered 28 Days Later, an assured, influential film that helped spark a zombie-movie renaissance. (OK, technically, nobody in this cinematic world uses the Z word. The creatures are called only “The Infected.”) Notably, Boyle and Garland sped up their monsters, making them into fast-moving, focused horrors, and matched that with a lean, quick, kinetic shooting style.

The second entry, 28 Weeks Later (2007) — with a different creative team — kept the tight pacing but lost a lot of the thematic texture and depth.

With this third iteration, Boyle and Garland are back, checking in on the state of Britain 28 years after the original outbreak of the rage virus, which almost instantaneously transforms humans into mindless, violent killers. (Or maybe, as the franchise has consistently suggested, just activates humanity’s pre-existing tendencies.)

The U.K. is now in permanent quarantine, its borders overseen by NATO patrols. In one island outpost off the northeast coast, a ragged group of survivors live much like medieval peasants, smithing and fletching and farming. There’s no electricity or running water, no modern medicine, no modern weaponry.

The community seems at first like a model of sustainability and simplicity, but there are brief glints of something darker.

Spike (newcomer Alfie Williams, who’s a real find) is 12, living with father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson of Nosferatu) and mother Isla (Killing Eve’s Jodie Comer). Isla is ill with an unknown malady that leaves her in pain and prone to confusion.

Jamie plans a risky trip to the mainland with Spike. In their village’s traditional rite of passage, they will forage for supplies, and Spike, hunting with bow and arrow, will make his first zombie kill. (“The more you kill, the easier it gets,” Jamie says, by way of encouragement.)

But the experience will also give Spike some ideas about finding medical help for his mom. Soon, another dangerous journey will raise the possibility of a new life and new choices.

As Spike negotiates his conflicting loyalties to each parent, the story becomes a rather tender coming-of-age tale. Still, it’s a boy-to-man story set amid bloody, bone-crunching zombie violence. As the series has evolved, so has the virus.

The Infected have bifurcated into two new categories. There are slow, flabby ground-crawlers that eat worms and are a bit pathetic. And there are the so-called Alphas, upright, swift, super-strong and possessing a malevolent form of intelligence.

Garland and Boyle have changed the rules about how the zombies survive, how they can be killed and what they can do, in ways that seem a little arbitrary. Or possibly worse than arbitrary — the filmmakers seem to be doing some things because “they look cool.”

There are a lot of video-game-style kills, with blood splattering on the camera lens, as well as a towering, terrifying Alpha that kills people by ripping their heads right off their spinal cords.

This generic goriness occasionally sits uneasily with the film’s serious aspirations.

There are interesting but underdeveloped meditations on the idea of Britishness, with ironic callbacks to wartime nostalgia and dreams of empire. There are ruined abbeys and ancient forests, and filming sites include Lindisfarne, a centre of medieval Celtic Christianity, and the Sycamore Gap tree (now sadly destroyed by vandals) near Hadrian’s Wall.

There are references to Rudyard Kipling and Shakespeare, clips from Laurence Olivier rallying the troops in Henry V, and nods to contemporary concerns such as the COVID-19 pandemic and Brexit.

There are moments of pitch-black comedy, including an appearance by the Teletubbies (“Eh-oh!), and one scene of preposterous sentimentality.

A lot of Garland and Boyle’s ideas are jammed into over-obvious, on-the-nose montages and dream sequences. Some come out in more organic ways, with the film’s final third using its characters — and its strong cast — to question what it means to be human, what constitutes a meaningful life and a good death, what endures after a civilization falls.

That last issue finds literal expression in a tower of human skulls and its hermit creator. Ralph Fiennes makes a late appearance as Dr. Kelson, who has been described by one of the older characters on the island as “odd.” When we finally encounter him, it looks as if the doctor might be odd the way Col. Kurtz is odd in Apocalypse Now, but the truth turns out to be much more complicated.

Fiennes’s terrifically weird turn is matched by nuanced performances by Comer and Taylor-Johnson, as well as standout work from the 14-year-old Williams, who carries this story on his narrow shoulders. There’s also an absolute last-minute drop-in by Jack O’Connell, recently seen river-dancing in Sinners.

Those final few minutes with O’Connell are an exasperating but undeniably intriguing segue into The Bone Temple, the sequel that was shot back-to-back with this film and is due for release in January 2026.

The existence of this second instalment goes some way to explaining why 28 Years Later can feel frustrating, with its incomplete storylines and jumpy tonal shifts. Going by this fleeting preview, The Bone Temple looks like it might answer some questions left open here.

It also looks to be even nutsier, and that’s saying something.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca