[COLUMN] 28 Years Later Imagines a Very British Apocalypse | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for 28 Years Later, which is just tremendous and absolutely worth seeing blind, if you can. It’s a strange, melancholy meditation on the long slow death of a world, and one of the better films of the summer. If you want, you can bookmark this piece and come back to it like 28 hours later.

28 Years Later is a film about islands. Spike (Alfie Williams) is a young boy who lives in an island community that has survived two decades into a zombie apocalypse, only tethered to the mainland by a causeway that disappears at high tide. This island is itself attached to a larger island, that of Great Britain. As depicted in 28 Days Later, the United Kingdom fell to a viral infection of “rage”, a highly contagious disease that turns its hosts into monstrous predators.

Largely discarding the events of the first sequel, 28 Weeks Later, 28 Years Later suggests that life has continued as normal outside the British Isles. Foreign troops enforce a quarantine of the island. Erik Sundqvist (Edvin Ryding), a Swedish NATO soldier who gets stranded in Britain when his patrol boat runs aground, talks about online shopping and delivery services. He keeps photos of his girlfriend on his smartphone. It is business as usual for the rest of the world.

In that sense, Britain stands apart from the rest of the world. This is part of the culture and community of the island that raised Spike. Before he leaves the safety of the island to journey to the mainland for the first time, Jenny (Stella Gonet) warns him that if he gets lost out there, there will be no rescue mission. “Once you set foot on the mainland,” Jenny advises him, “you’re on your own.” It is a philosophy that underpins so much of how the characters in 28 Years Later see the world.

28 Years Later is very firmly rooted in British culture and history. The film opens with voiceover from Teletubbies, a classic piece of British children’s entertainment. The social club on the island hangs a framed portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. The first trailer for 28 Years Later, and Spike’s first march to the mainland, is set to the rhythm of Rudyard Kipling’s Boots. The final sequence finds Spike confronted by what is best described as “a feral pack of Jimmies Savile.” Writer Alex Garland and director Danny Boyle have crafted a film very deeply steeped in British culture and memory.

At the risk of reducing an entire national psychology to a simple cliché, Britain has long defined its identity as that of an island. It exists at a remove from the rest of Europe. Its sense of self is more rigidly defined by cliffs and oceans than landlocked states. This perhaps informs some of the country’s siege mentality, the myth of “the island fortress” that held out against the German Blitz during the Second World War.

One doesn’t need to watch a dystopian zombie movie to imagine a version of Great Britain cut off from mainland Europe. Nine years ago, the United Kingdom voted by a slim majority to leave the European Union as part of “Brexit”, a choice rooted in English nationalism and British exceptionalism. This decision has had dire consequences for Great Britain, costing the nation £100 billion a year in lost output, destroying the British Pound as a currency and creating a general sense of despair.

Garland has been quite candid about how Brexit shaped so much of 28 Years Later. Asked whether the film was influenced by the recent global pandemic, Garland rejected that assumption. “Covid was not in my mind because it was too recent and too present, but Brexit was,” the screenwriter admitted. “A sense of the globe just sort of shifting its position. Turning their backs, not really looking in this direction. Not really giving a shit [about the UK].

Indeed, the early scenes on the island cannot help but evoke the romantic notion of Brexit. Among the first inhabitants of the island introduced to the audience are fishermen and farmers, key constituencies in the push for Britain’s separation from the European Union. These idyllic shots of British life are juxtaposed with constant hand-drawn signs that serve as reminders of the community’s limited resources and the need for rationing. There is a shortage of doctors. Bacon has become a scarcity.

In 28 Years Later, Britain is haunted. Throughout the film, Boyle works with his long-term collaborator Jon Harris to create a strange and dreamlike edit. The film is constantly intercut with strange and surrealist imagery that bears little direct relation to the events on screen. As Spike marches to the mainland, it is cut against archive footage of British soldiers marching to war. As Spike shoots his arrows at the infected, it is cut against legions of Saxon or even Arthurian archers at work. Boyle folds in footage from Laurence Olivier’s Henry V.

It is hard to tell what is real and what is imagined in the world of 28 Years Later. As the island celebrates Spike’s return from his adventure, there are repeated shots of a woman wearing a strange pagan mask. She might be real – the local archery instructor Sam (Christopher Fulford) wears a similar mask – but she might also be something more ethereal. Spike’s father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) regales the islanders with tall tales of Spike’s bravery, but Spike knows these are all lies.

If Spike’s father is a liar, then Spike’s mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), is a fantasist. Suffering from hallucinations and confusion, Isla is frequently lost in a world of her own. She imagines herself “falling through time”, unable to distinguish present, past or future. It is perhaps notable that “Isla” cannot help but evoke the word “island”, is Spanish for the word “island” and derives from the Scottish island of “Islay.” Subtlety is, perhaps, overrated. For Spike’s parents, when confronted with this strange new world, the only sane responses are either deceit or delusion.

As Boyle edits and cuts 28 Years Later, the film takes on the quality of the fever dream of a nation state. The audience is invited to imagine that this is what it might feel like if an entire country shared Isla’s tenuous grip on reality. One of Boyle’s favored recurring visual motifs in the first half of the film is a shot of St. George’s Cross, the flag of England, blowing in the breeze. The flag is ragged. As Spike decides to flee the island community with his mother, the flag is literally burning.

As one might expect from a long-delayed sequel to a horror classic, 28 Years Later is steeped in nostalgia. That nostalgia is often childish; the film opens with Teletubbies and Spike considers taking a Power Rangers toy with him on his expedition, but decides against it. With their bows and arrows, Jamie and Spike recall Robin Hood. Spike and Isla shelter in a Happy Eater, a defunct restaurant chain. Boyle resurrects the Sycamore Gap tree for several shots. However, as with his other long-delayed follow-up to a beloved feature, T2 Trainspotting, Boyle treats that nostalgia as a poison pill. It is alluring and seductive, but it is also suffocating and dangerous.

The film’s nostalgia is steeped in death. The old buildings that Spike shelters in are ruins. An abandoned cottage where Jamie and Spike seek respite collapses into itself. The Happy Eater diner that Isla and Spike hide in is flooded with toxic and flammable gas. As her condition worsens, Isla retreats into a childlike state, imaging Spike to be her father and getting trapped in memories about childhood trips. When there is no future, the past exerts an incredible gravity.

In 28 Years Later, the diagnosis is terminal. Seeking a cure for Isla’s condition, Spike sets out with her to visit Doctor Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), a former general practitioner who has gone quite mad. Isla and Spike discover that Kelson has built a strange and macabre monument from the remains of local survivors and infected. He calls it a “temple of bones”, but he also describes it as a “memento mori.” He translates it from Latin – “ironically, a dead language” – as “remember you must die.”

Kelson diagnoses Isla with advanced cancer of her brain and her body. He cannot tell where the cancer began, only that it has metastasized. Despite Spike’s best efforts, there is nothing that Kelson can do to treat the disease. Instead, Kelson can only offer Isla “a good death.” He can euthanize her, using morphine. He then invites Spike to pick a place for her among the mountain of statues that he has assembled. Everything dies. There is no cure. Nothing lasts forever.

In this context, it is interesting that 28 Years Later is largely about the failure of parents to protect their children. Jamie takes Spike out on his first adventure to the mainland, insisting on taking the boy before Jenny thinks he is ready. The expedition goes wrong, forcing the pair to spend the night sheltering from the infected in an empty cottage. Later, Isla is mostly helpless as Spike ferries her to Kelson. Jamie doesn’t l leave the island to go look for his wife and son, seemingly heeding Jenny’s instruction.

Even the infected seem to have families. When Jamie takes Spike to the mainland to hunt the infected, the first target (Peter Labas) that they find is crawling through the foliage. Spike shoots it with an arrow through the neck. Jamie spots another (Kat Kitchener) approaching and kills it quickly. Reacting instinctively to movement in the bushes, Jamie turns with his arrow at the ready to find himself facing a small infected child (Ember Storm). Jamie hesitates, allowing the child to scurry into the forest. The impression is that of a family unit, two adults and a child, that has been violently disrupted.

On their journey to Kelson, Isla and Spike come across a pregnant infected woman (Celi Crossland), who seems to have become pregnant while infected. The child is born without infection. “The magic of the placenta,” Kelson speculates. The woman immediately turns feral again. The implication is that this is not the first such pregnancy, but in other cases the parents quickly turned on the child. Another infected (Chi Lewis-Parry), seemingly the baby’s father, chases Isla and Spike.

This theme is seeded in the movie’s opening scene, which is largely disconnected from the narrative of the film itself. A young boy named Jimmy (Rocco Haynes) is put in the front room to watch Teletubbies as the world ends around him. The adults cannot protect the children, most of whom get slaughtered. Jimmy watches his mother (Kim Allen) transform and his father (Sandy Bachelor) embrace the end of the world, with nobody able to look out for Jimmy himself.

28 Years Later has the quality of a folktale or a fable. This is a story of a generation that has at best been abandoned by their parents and at worst betrayed by them. It is a timely story. In the specific context of Brexit, it is the younger generation who did not want that self-imposed isolation who will see most of their opportunities evaporate as a result of it. Spike leaves the island to go find himself on the mainland, like many a young Briton has done interrailing around Europe.

The film ends on something of a cliffhanger, as Spike comes face to face with an older Jimmy (Jack O’Connell), who has seemingly attracted a cult of similarly lost young people to follow him as a quasi-religious figure. As Jimmy and his track-suited followers tear into a horde of infected in a heavily stylized action scene, it really does seem like these neglected youth have been allowed to turn feral and savage. What do young people believe as the world collapses around them?

28 Years Later is a melancholy meditation on how even the end of the world gets filtered through the lens of British exceptionalism.