28 Years Later - film review (spoilers)

2025 was the year when giant zombie penises, Jimmy Saville, and the Power Rangers somehow ended up in the discourse of a single film.

I’m not sure what I expected from Boyle and Garland’s long-awaited return to the fast-zombie apocalypse. It took them 23 years, which is maddening in itself (they could have waited a few more years for the sake of neatness). The 2002 original revitalised the shambling brain-muncher genre before it was eventually run into the ground by the likes of The Walking Dead and countless other Z fiction.

I assumed we’d get something interesting, and 28 Years Later definitely qualifies. What I didn’t expect was that ending. But we’ll get there.

The film opens in an isolated community off the coast of Northumberland and refreshingly avoids leaning on nostalgia. Instead, it introduces a new chapter with a fresh cast of characters. At its heart, this is a story about a young boy trying to make sense of his place in the world while doing his best to care for his ailing mother.

The performances are top-tier, especially from Alfie Williams and a delightfully batty Ralph Fiennes. The British countryside is shot with surprising tenderness, practically glowing even as it swarms with different strains of the infected.

The addition of new infected types is a clever move. They come across like classic video game archetypes, ranging from slug-like creepers to towering boss-level alphas (complete with swinging johnsons). By creating a hierarchy within the infected, the film adds urgency and complexity to the mechanics of survival. This choice also reinforces the film’s central idea - the repetition of past evils.

More than anything, 28 Years Later is about cycles: cycles of trauma and violence, on both a personal and national scale.

Early scenes show life inside a fortified city, where children are trained to be killers and everyone sticks to their role. Moments of daily routine are intercut with glimpses of medieval brutality and some of Britain’s historical low points (or, depending on how you view it, business as usual). It’s the most effective use of the zombie-as-metaphor since Romero last picked up a camera.

Visually, the film is stunning. Gone is the stripped-down aesthetic of 28 Days Later. In its place are wide, sweeping shots of grassy moors, an ethereal night-time chase across a flooded causeway, and some bold, inventive camerawork that adds a real sense of dynamism. 

Several of the infected encounters are both terrifying and thrilling. A particularly memorable one involves a brutal alpha ambush on a special forces squad.

And then there’s the ending. It’s the scene that caused internet confusion and had everyone overusing the term "Tonal whiplash". On the surface, it’s undeniably absurd: Jack O’Connell, in a wig, delivering his lines with a variation on his Sinners accent (Scottish cult leader rather than Irish vamp boss). But there’s more going on beneath the silliness. The finale reframes the series lore in a way that is both darkly funny and unexpectedly sharp. After all, nobody really understood the full truth about Saville before the apocalypse hit.

More importantly, the ending serves as a symbolic conclusion to Spike’s personal arc. His journey from childhood to a morally hazy adulthood mirrors a nation that keeps stumbling from crisis to crisis. Often there’s no warning. Sometimes, the chaos is led by a bleach-blond goofball and his entourage of grinning wide boys.