'28 Years Later': And we've waited so long for this nonsense?

There's nothing worse than a spiteful friend . And, above all, one who's been saving their revenge, only to serve it not cold, but moldy. Twenty-three years have passed since the premiere of 28 Days Later (2002), the Danny Boyle film written by Alex Garland that revamped the zombie genre—sorry, infected—and imagined an empty, dystopian London ravaged by a rabies pandemic. If George A. Romero 's zombies moved with a fentanyl-fueled gait, in Boyle's universe the infected began to sprint like Usain Bolt . The film was a hit, but they ended up charging a fee. They had met in the late 1990s. Danny Boyle had read the (magnificent) novel The Beach , written by Garland, and ended up adapting it: Leonardo DiCaprio in Thailand. Garland then wrote the script for 28 Days Later , if you'll pardon the redundancy. A second installment was entrusted to Juan Carlos Fresnadillo , just to avoid repeating himself. It was with Sunshine (2007), when a disagreement over the film's ending led to their divorce . Don't say that filmmaking isn't serious.

Separation of assets and the Cold War . Boyle went his own way, winning eight Oscars for Slumdog Millionaire (2009), including Best Director. Garland, who started out as the ex-spouse to be pitied, collaborated with other directors of varying stature until he ventured into directing. His films include Ex-Machina (2014), winner of an Oscar and for which Garland was nominated for Best Screenplay, Men (2022), Civil War (2024), and Warfare (2025), films that have established him as a director as testosterone-filled as he is daring. He also directed the series Devs (2020), an instant cult favorite for science fiction fans. Garland is, without a doubt, an author. And a great author. Risky, sharp, clairvoyant—think of how he predicted the current situation in the United States —and daring. Risk is always welcome. And, above all, in a genre that already seems worn out and hackneyed after the handful of series, spin-offs , sequels and counter-sequels that have filled popular culture in the last decade.

That's why it's hard to understand what happened here. There's nothing worse than a spiteful friend who, after years of dirty looks and avoidance, decides to revive the lucrative franchise, and the two creators shake hands and promise forgiveness. But one of them, in this case Alex Garland, saddles his former friend, in this case Danny Boyle , with an unsalvageable nonsense of a script, a pile of headless decisions, a seeing is believing, a hemlock-flavored candy, a noose around the neck shaped like a tie, a lollipop of exposed wires, a barbed-wire suppository : the final revenge.

As the film progresses, it's not difficult to imagine Garland tapping away at her computer like a Phantom of the Paradise . As someone who also writes fiction when she can, she knows how to distinguish incompetence from cruelty. And, oh my! This is a different kettle of fish. The urge to rub one's corneas in oneself not once, not twice, not three times is arousing. Even the deliberate comedy seems involuntary until only interpersonal black humor can explain it.

28 Years Later does indeed start twenty-eight years after the United Kingdom was ravaged by a pandemic— not the Brexit pandemic —that forced the entire country into quarantine. No, I'm lying. The first sequence takes us back to the beginning of the epidemic, with a somewhat clumsy and rushed sequence featuring Teletubbies, children, blood, and the ever-present "Father, why have you forsaken me?" Because it's also a bit about religion . It's about religion and inherited roles and fathers and mothers and the return to a class-based society and rudimentary rituals and beliefs and tribes and so on.

Twenty-eight years later, the last village—or not, who knows—survives like the Gauls, entrenched and surrounded by stakes on a Scottish island, from which the rest of the United Kingdom can only be reached via a narrow path that crosses a strait and disappears when the tide comes in. You can't swim across because of the currents, which is very useful for keeping the infected out. In this, Lucio Fulci's underwater zombies would have the advantage: don't miss this sequence of a zombie fistfighting a shark. The survivors have recreated a medieval society in which women collect food and sing songs, and men learn to shoot with a bow.

Boyle's great success, it must be said, in threading this first part of the film with sequences from war, totalitarian and medieval films, to the rhythm of Rudyard Kipling 's poem Boots , which emulates the alienation of a soldier in war . In any war. The problem is that this resource is quickly abandoned. Aberrant shots, impossible framing and anamorphic lenses help to add violence to the film, which is shown - in its first part - permanently in tension.

In this medieval village, Spike ( Alfie Williams ) is a twelve-year-old boy who must undergo a rite of initiation. Accompanied by his father ( Aaron Taylor-Johnson ), he must cross the road, reach the United Kingdom, kill a couple of infected and return as a man. Along the way they meet obese infected - or a kind of mutants - who eat worms, anorexic infected who have not eaten for a long time and a kind of alpha infected, who are much bigger, much wilder and much better endowed - genitally - than the rest. Because the infected have lived through a kind of involution and now they organize themselves like groups of Neanderthals , which is a very interesting decision, because it raises the dangers of a society that is carried away by its primary instincts, which are violent, territorial and unequal, in which the alpha male poses the great threat. So far so good. 28 Years Later hooks you, exploits the suspense and contains subtext.

However, halfway through the film—or a little before—the creators make a very risky decision that turns the film into... something else. Spike's mother, Isla ( Jodie Comer ), has been bedridden for years due to what everyone believes is a psychiatric illness. At first, it seems that the woman is infected, but it's only—only—incapacitating headaches. And this character will be of capital importance in the film's development, which will become a Terrence Malick -style family drama and will end with a reflection on death, with monumental ossuaries—in the end, one of the first complex signs of civilization has to do with funeral rituals—and strange mystical disquisitions. And with kids dressed as Teletubbies involved. There's also an interesting moment of interspecies sisterhood , which perhaps could have been explored a little more, and which points to a new path for the evolution of the saga. And Ralph Fiennes appears in a Mengelian role.

There's comedy, there's horror, there's drama, and there's surprise ; everything that happens feels unexpected. At least Garland can't be accused of being complacent or stuck in her comfort zone. But at the expense of verisimilitude, tone , and the emotional coherence of characters who are difficult to understand beyond the madness. But who am I, having never lived through a zombie holocaust , to judge them?

28 Years Later opens the floodgates for the new wave of infected cinema: scheduled for next year is 28 Years Later: Temple of Bones , directed by Nia DaCosta , which apparently stars Alfie Williams, Ralph Fiennes, and Alex Garland. Here, a Garland fanatic prays that the filmmaker doesn't let himself be taken over by alienation from the assignment, vengeful rage , or crushed by the "boots, boots, boots, moving up and down," as Rudyard Kipling would say, in the trenches of mass cinema.