Review: '28 Years Later' continues the fast-zombie franchise with guts and gore, but wins out with brains and heart

It’s odd to say a filmmaking team is taking a risk by returning to a successful horror franchise 23 years after they started it, but that’s the impact director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland made with their 2002 classic “24 Days Later.”

Boyle and Garland have reunited to make the worthy successor to the franchise, “28 Years Later,” a bone-chilling and thoughtful thriller that explores how humans don’t just outrun disaster but adapt to it. 

After a prologue in which a young preacher’s son (Rocco Hayes) escapes those infected by the rage virus in the early days of the outbreak, Garland’s script moves ahead 28 years to a small island off the coast of England. There’s a self-sufficient village there, with gates to keep out the infected.

It’s there that Spike (Alfie Williams), age 12, learns survival skills from his dad, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who’s preparing to take him on his first outing to the mainland – and notch his first kill of an infected. While they’re out, Spike sees a bonfire in the distance, suggesting that there are non-infected people still surviving off the island.

Alfie sees that fire as a chance to find help not available in their village. His mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), is sick with something — not the rage virus, but with something beyond his neighbors’ ability to treat. When he hears from a villager that there might be a doctor (Ralph Fiennes) on the mainland, Alfie hatches a desperate plan.

Boyle and Garland build the world around Alfie and the village with just enough detail, and a smattering of gore and non-sexy nudity tho show how pitiful and slovenly the infected have become — and how some of them, the Alphas, have come to rule the vast spaces of the mainland. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere about the brainless majority dominating through numbers and bile, but Boyle lets it stew in the background while he’s busy scaring the crap out of us. 

Boyle and Garland’s neatest trick is the sharp turn in the movie’s second half, as they strip out the horror elements and plunge us into a surprisingly tender drama about love and grief. Fiennes is tenderly beautiful in this part of the film, but the strongest emotions are brought by Comer and the young Williams, playing a mother-son team who are heartbreaking.

At the very end, Boyle throws in an odd coda that also serves as a handoff to director Nia DaCosta, who has been making a second franchise movie, “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple,” alongside this production. (It’s set to be released early next year.) DaCosta’s a strong director, but she’ll have a lot to live up to after this intense ride.

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’28 Years Later’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 20, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence, grisly images, graphic nudity, language and brief sexuality. Running time: 115 minutes.