In the Flesh: 28 Years Later

As Jaime (Aaron-Taylor Johnson) and his twelve-year-old son, Spike (Alfie Williams) leave their island home on Spike’s first hunt, a stylized recitation of Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘Boots Boots Boots’ by Taylor Holmes descends like a pall. Holmes’ voice is heavily distorted, evoking the quality of a school announcement or an emergency broadcast. His cadence is quick and relentless, perfectly capturing the regimented tramp of Kipling’s verse until it sounds like something sampled in a Godspeed You! Black Emperor track about the state demolition of brutalist public housing. Director Danny Boyle intercuts his characters’ crossing to the mainland with footage of English military parades, clips from movies set in Medieval england, and other violent ephemera. Even the stag’s head left mounted among the branches of a pine by an infected alpha recalls the tradition of the mort, the ritual beheading of a hunted deer. 

The empire that ruled half the world for centuries, then cut itself off from the rest of Europe like a tumor trying to remove the body it’s attached to is alive and well in the hearts of men like Jaime and his fellow citizens. In a legion hall, beneath a kitschy drawing of Elizabeth II in her prime, the town celebrates Spike’s first kill. They ply the boy with beer, roar unintelligible drinking songs, and celebrate the pointless risking of a child’s life like it’s the successful evacuation of Dunkirk, framed and shot all the while like demonic Black Lodge entities at a kegger. Staggering outside to vomit, Spike loses his innocence in earnest at the sight of his father betraying his mentally ill mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), with a local woman. In a clear parallel to the post-Brexit UK’s cultural decline, the island has become a small and ignorant place, swaddled in its own clannish xenophobia.

There are a handful of things here which straightforwardly do not work. The effects aren’t there to sell the benzine gas scene. The human/infected moment of green between Isla and an infected woman giving birth in a derelict train is poorly conceived. The ending action scene in which we circle back to the vignette which opens the film feels almost absurdly out of place, an intrusion from some quasi-Clockwork Orange music video. In spite of this, 28 Years Later works. It turns the zombie genre on its head, ducks expectations at every turn, and takes some truly outrageous swings. Newcomer Alfie Williams, Ralph Fiennes, Jodie Comer, and even Aaron-Taylor Johnson turn in tremendously committed performances in service to a gorgeous meditation on death, the limits of human ingenuity and willpower, and our fundamental powerlessness in the world.