28 Years Later review: Zombie-apocalypse horror is a 'never-dull' monster mash-up

Alex Garland and Danny Boyle have reunited for a follow-up to their 2002 classic. It has visual flair, terrifying adversaries and a scene-stealing performance from Ralph Fiennes.

28 Years Later is part zombie-apocalypse horror, part medieval world-building, part sentimental family story and – most effectively – part Heart of Darkness in its journey toward a madman in the woods. That mashup is not necessarily a bad thing, since most of those parts work so well in this follow-up to the great 2002 film 28 Days Later, about a virus that decimates London. The new film is one of the year's most anticipated largely because it comes from the original's creators, director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland. It glows with Boyle's visual flair, Garland's ambitious screenplay and a towering performance from Ralph Fiennes, whose character enters halfway through the film and unexpectedly becomes its fraught soul. But as with Frankenstein's monster, the seams are conspicuous, making for a patchwork that is never dull but not as fully engaging as it might have been.

A lot has changed in the 23 years since the original, of course. Boyle, then known for smart indie films like Trainspotting, went on to win an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire. Garland, then a novelist and screenwriter – 28 Days was his first – is now the director of politically pointed films including Civil War. In 28 Years Later, the central problem is that Garland's political bent and Boyle's commercial instincts don't entirely mesh.

The world they have created is specific and impressive though, starting with an island where people have survived the decades since the outbreak by isolating themselves from the still-plague-ridden mainland of England, reached by a causeway that can only be walked across at low tide. It is a community that might have existed in the Middle Ages. Without 21st-Century resources, they make their own arrows for weapons and use wood for fuel. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is impressively solid as Jamie, a harried but responsible husband and father. Jodie Comer plays his wife, Isla, bedridden and occasionally delirious in this community which has no doctor to diagnose her. Mostly, Comer has to look woeful. Isla can barely remember why Jamie is about to take their son, Spike (Alfie Williams), on a ritualistic trip to the mainland. It is time for him to make his first kill of an infected creature, a survival tactic he will need to know.

Boyle takes full advantage of his striking technical skills in the father-son hunting scenes, which are pure zombie action-horror, full of kinetic camera movements and quick cuts as Jamie and Spike race through the woods, shooting arrows and trying to outrun the infected. The creatures are officially not zombies, as much as they look and act that way, but victims of the same blood-borne virus that caused people to become full of rage in the original film, turning them into lumbering, mush-brained marauders. Decades later they have morphed. Some, called the Slow-Lows, look like hippos crawling on all fours. Others are faster and smarter than ever. All are naked, caked in dirt, and spout geysers of blood when an arrow hits them. The danger feels visceral.

Some stylish flourishes briefly comment on this embattled world. A scratchy, ominous 1915 recording of the Rudyard Kipling poem Boots, about infantrymen, (the same used in the film's trailer) is heard over recurring images of war, from the Crusades to the 20th- Century World Wars. Text at the start of the film tells us that Europe managed to push the virus away, quarantining it in Britain, which has been abandoned by the rest of the world. French and Swedish boats patrol the waters to enforce the quarantine. But that politically acute theme, which might have been so resonant with the issue of isolationism today, goes nowhere.

Spike, whose story is so central, is a bland character. A thread of the narrative about the boy and his mother strains for emotion and includes a twist about a pregnant infected woman that is ludicrous even for a horror film. And separated from the original in every way except its source story, for a long stretch the film lands as a more visually stunning, less emotionally rich variation on The Last of Us.

But it takes on a quieter, more psychological tone and becomes infinitely better when Fiennes arrives. It's here that Boyle and Garland truly elevate and reimagine the genre. Fiennes's character, Kelton, lives on the mainland and was once a doctor. Spike believes he might be able to help his mother, although Jamie warns that everyone knows Kelton is insane. Fiennes plays him with a shaved head, a dash of wit, and skin that looks orange. "Excuse my appearance. I paint myself in iodine," he politely says when he first meets Spike and Isla. "The virus doesn't like iodine at all." (I did wonder how he got so much iodine after all those apocalyptic years, but let's not be pedantic about it.)

And he shows them his lovingly designed temple, with tall columns made of bones elegantly laid out alongside a tower of skulls. It is, he explains, a Memento Mori, a reminder that we all die. Each skull reminds him that it was once part of a living person in the flesh, not a monster. Creepy, yes, but Fiennes also makes Kelton gentle, a man of deep compassion, who regrets that there are no longer hospitals where the sick like Isla can be treated. He is the most humane person on screen, which is largely down to Fiennes's vivid, layered performance. One of the film's strengths is that you can leave debating just how unhinged Kelton really is.

28 Years Later is the first in a projected new trilogy. The second part, written by Garland and directed by Nia DaCosta, has already been shot and is scheduled to be released in January. That one is called 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, an excellent sign considering how Fiennes's character runs away with this imaginative but uneven film.

★★★★☆

28 Years Later is released in cinemas in the UK and US on 20 June.

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