'28 Years Later' Is the First Great Zombie Movie of the 2020s

28 Years Later is now playing at the Southampton Playhouse. Tickets are available here.

For nearly 60 years, every decade has been embodied by a zombie movie, and while this one is only halfway over, it’s hard to imagine anything else as deserving of that slot as 28 Years Later.

That may sound like a big statement, but since their inception, zombie movies have been all about big statements. George Romero’s seminal 1968 Night of the Living Dead, with its slow-walking corpses and bleak finale, hinted at a nation lumbering into violent divisions of racial tensions and the Vietnam war. Ten years later, Romero took a swing at the onslaught of American consumerism with his zombies populating an entire supermall in Dawn of the Dead.

As the concept expanded widely across the horror genre, the 1980s was flush with memorable riffs on the undead concept, from The Evil Dead to Reanimator, though Dan O’Bannon’s The Return of the Living Dead – with its punk rock flesh-eaters created by toxic waste – held the most signifiers of its moment. By the 90s, the genre was getting overstuffed with imitators (including a Night of the Living Dead remake) and one underappreciated masterpiece, the surreal dark comedy Cemetery Man, with Rupert Everett as a gravedigger who may or may not be haunted by the death around him. The 90s were “peak cinema” by many estimates, and director Sam Raimi tapped into that with Army of Darkness, as it spoke to the exaggerated storytelling swings of blockbusters from that era and satirized them at the same time.

Then came the bittersweet 2004 irreverence of Shawn of the Dead, which announced the millennium as a period defined by pervasive irony, and reignited interest in the genre as a whole. The 2010s were defined by the rapid acceleration of globalization, so it was only appropriate for the definitive zombie movie to come from outside the U.S. In the Korean sensation Train to Busan, hordes of undead overtake a fast-moving train, reflecting the broader sense of a civilization hurtling towards an ominous unknown.

Enter 2020, a year that began with Brexit and dovetailed into a global pandemic. Quarantine was commonplace. International travel became a luxury no longer taken for granted. The ubiquity of iPhones led to widespread documentation of virtually every minutiae in a rapidly changing, often divisive world. A rapid-fire media landscape moves faster than ever, resulting in a debilitating effect on those caught off guard.

All of those elements factor into 28 Years Later. Director Danny Boyle’s masterful 2002 feature 28 Days Later utilized scrappy digital cinematography to heighten the dread of the so-called rage virus that quickly destabilizes humanity, as infected people transform into murderous monsters within seconds. Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland delivered a disturbing variation on the zombie apocalypse that intensified the concept and rooted it in an unsettling degree of naturalism, an achievement that carried over to the taut sequel 28 Weeks Later.

But 28 Years Later is a different beast. While the first two movies revolved around an attempt to stop the virus from spreading, the new movie shows the bleak aftermath of those efforts, with the UK existing in an ongoing quarantine limbo, while the rest of the world has moved on. It’s here that 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) lives in a gated community on an island with his alpha-male dad (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and ailing mom (Jodie Comer). Spike’s view of the world shifts from his father’s domineering guidance to a new sense of autonomy as he takes charge of his mother’s fate. Ultimately wandering the rage-infested countryside, Spike learns how to grow up in a broken world by gradually navigating it on his own terms.

His journey takes several tense and gory turns, but the second half of the movie shifts into more of a melancholic, lyrical mode as it transforms into a deeper meditation on loss and the maturity necessary to overcome the alienating power of grief. It then arrives at a zany, unexpected finale that sets up the upcoming sequel, while extending the commentary of the movie to a final target that won’t be spoiled here. Needless to say, it’s a funny and strange tonal shift that only a filmmaker with complete confidence in his material could pull off.

Boyle has always excelled at injecting flashes of dark comedy into unexpected situations, from Shallow Grave to 127 Hours. His latest is pretty grim, but not afraid to mine humor from the unseemly circumstances of a chaotic world. 28 Years Later is as much an auteur film as Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme. It has all the hallmarks of Boyle’s filmmaking going back to his Trainspotting days: gritty characters, a relentless pace, and needle drops of the highest order. It’s thrilling, intense, and rich with meaning: a zombie movie to die for.