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

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

Nearly three decades after a rage virus was leaked from a bio-weapons lab, mainland Britain is now a designated quarantine zone where pockets of survivors exist alongside the hordes of infected. Within this hostile environment, a young boy learns that survival takes many forms. UK director Danny Boyle’s long-awaited return to the franchise he created in 2002 may lack the immediate, visceral bite of his original 28 Days Later, but nevertheless brings a satisfying mix of old horrors and new ideas.

 A satisfying mix of old horrors and new ideas

There is a lot riding on Boyle’s return, and that of original screenwriter Alex Garland – not least because this is the first in a planned trilogy, with Nia DaCosta-directed 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (also written by Garland) coming in January 2026. There is also a legacy to uphold: the low-budget 28 Days Later was a shot in the arm for UK horror, making $75m at the global box office and becoming a genre classic. Sequel 28 Weeks Later (directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo) made $65m in 2005, and this follow-up has been in the works ever since – although delays have seen it evolve from the planned ‘28 Months Later’. Made with a much bigger budget, and a cast that includes Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer and Ralph Fiennes, 28 Years Later should draw the crowds when it rolls out globally from June 18.

While the end of 28 Weeks Later saw the rage virus apparently migrate to Paris, here opening titles state it has been driven back from continental Europe and the British mainland has been quarantined. International boat patrols ensure no infected can escape, and that no desperate souls can make a bid for safety. It is a gut-punch set-up, which immediately draws on the collective nightmares of Covid, Brexit and the rise of nationalism.

With so much time having passed since the events of the previous films (which are recapped in a short, sharp opening sequence set in 2002), Boyle, Garland and their creative team are able to build their post-apocalyptic vision from the ground up. The film is not fuelled by the desperation and panic of the first two instalments, in which people were attempting to return things to how they always had been. This new normal has had time to bed in, and survivors congregate in isolated communities like the one on Holy Island (aka Lindisfarne, off the northeast coast of England). Production designer Gareth Pugh imagines this community as a vivid mix of turn-of-the-century bucolic idyll – villagers live off the land, share resources, look after each other – and slightly cultish survivalist enclave over which the threat of violence casts a permanent shadow.

Holy Island’s youngsters, like 12-year-old Spike (newcomer Alfie Williams) know no different, and it is with excitement that he prepares to venture across the causeway – passable only at high tide – with his father Jamie (Taylor-Johnson) to visit the mainland and claim his first kill. Through Spike’s cloistered eyes, northeast England appears a vast green and pleasant land, lensed in glorious, immersive 2.76:1 widescreen by cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle. Elsewhere, action sequences are shot with iPhones, often multiples on rigs or attached to the infected, pulling the viewer further into the action and harking back to the franchise’s handheld digital origins.

Jamie, however, knows that, beauty aside, this remains a place of danger; as they walk, Young Fathers’ intense score combines with an ardent, altered narration of Rudyard Kipling’s repetitive wartime poem ‘Boots’ to create a frightening, disorienting soundscape. And it is not long before the pair come across the infected – they, too, have evolved into distinct groups: the original generation, naked and fast; the Slow-Lows, grotesque, bloated, decomposing creatures who slither along the ground; and, most terrifyingly, the Alphas, morphed by the virus into huge, super-strong behemoths who think nothing of wielding a human spinal cord like a whip.

While Spike and Jamie make it back to Holy Island alive – just – Spike’s worldview has been altered forever, particularly as he begins to lose faith in his father’s judgment. Williams is impressive as this conflicted youngster, his careful balance of vulnerability and strength grounding this coming-of-age-in-extremis narrative. Taylor-Johnson, too, is sympathetic as a man wrestling with the opposing emotions of keeping his child safe and preparing him for the harsh realities of life.

Determined to take matters into his own hands, Spike brings his seriously ill mother Isla (an excellent Jodie Comer) across the causeway in search of the mysterious Doctor Kelson (Fiennes, in entertaining Heart Of Darkness mode) who is rumoured to live on the mainland. Here, Garland’s choice to use an ailing or absent wife/mother as dramatic motivation for male characters proves a familiar frustration, but works within the context of a franchise that has always been skewed towards male survival.

Spike and Isla make it to the doctor, helped by stranded Swedish soldier Erik (Edvin Ryding), whose iPhone and tales of the outside world are like an alien language. What they find takes the franchise into new territory, both thematically – the doctor’s towering piles of bones and skulls a dynamic symbol of this new reality – and literally, as, together with a coda that introduces the droog-esque character of Jimmy (Jack O’Connell), it lays the groundwork for the next film. And while the franchise has undeniably mutated over the last 23 years, from scrappy guerilla horror to blockbuster tentpole, this remains a compelling dystopian world to which viewers will want to return.