I watched 28 Years Later and I liked it. 3.5/5
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They Came Back Swinging — Mostly
There’s something kind of thrilling about seeing Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s names pop up again in the opening credits of a 28 Days Later sequel. It’s like being invited back into a house you half-remember, but now the lights are flickering and the wallpaper’s peeling in new, weird patterns. 28 Years Later brings a lot of that old intensity back, but it’s also not trying to copy the original. It wants to be weirder, more mythic, more meditative. And sometimes that works beautifully. Sometimes it just sort of spins out.
The opening is strong. We see a kid, Jimmy Crystal, watching Teletubbies while the world falls apart outside. Classic tonal whiplash, and it immediately puts you on edge. What follows is a brutal flash of infection chaos, a religious father offering his life to the infected as if it’s divine will, and the kind of spiritual unease that sets the tone for the rest of the film. It’s not just about survival anymore. It’s about belief, memory, and what’s left when the blood stops drying.
Fast forward. Britain’s still quarantined. The virus is supposedly gone, but let’s be real — this wouldn’t be a 28 movie if that were actually true.
A New Generation, Same Old Infection
Now we’re on Lindisfarne, which is just about the most hauntingly cinematic setting possible for a post-Rage drama. The tides isolate it, and the isolation has made the people a little strange. Jamie and Isla are raising their son Spike there, scraping together something like a life. Isla’s sick, Jamie’s hiding something, and Spike’s hitting that age where he’s about ready to start asking dangerous questions.
Spike and Jamie cross to the mainland on what’s basically a post-apocalyptic bar mitzvah — a hunting rite of passage. Naturally, things go sideways. They find a chained infected branded with the name “Jimmy,” hinting that some of the infected have evolved into something more than mindless rage machines. What follows is a tense chase back across the causeway and a near-death escape that turns into a full-on village celebration, complete with a ballista kill. Because apparently, when civilization collapses, medieval weapons make a comeback.
A Movie That Feels Like a Fever Dream
This is where the film starts to lean more into the dreamlike and symbolic. The cinematography is absolutely wild — wide-as-hell framing, handheld digital texture, some scenes shot with iPhones, others looking almost like found footage stitched into an art film. It’s chaotic in both a good and bad way. There are moments where it feels immersive and raw, and other times where the visual ambition starts to get in the way of clarity.
Still, the movie finds emotional footing again when Spike leaves the island with Isla and ends up in the hands of Erik, a twitchy, paranoid Swedish sailor who is very much not okay. The infected aren’t the only threat here, and the movie makes that point clear. But it also wants to twist the knife in more personal ways. Isla finds an infected woman in labor and helps deliver her baby. A completely uninfected baby. For one second, there’s this shimmer of hope. And then the hope gets shot in the chest by a man with a gun and a broken worldview.
It’s a hard scene. It’s supposed to be.
Grief and Skulls and Monsters That Remember
Enter Ralph Fiennes as Dr. Kelson, who’s apparently spent the last few years building a temple out of human bones and naming infected like pets. Somehow, this doesn’t feel as ridiculous as it sounds. Fiennes plays it with such calm intensity that it actually lands. His whole thing is about remembering the dead, loving while you can, facing mortality instead of running from it.
Isla’s story ends in the only way it really could — with her deciding her own death, and Spike carrying her skull to the top of a monument like some kind of symbolic torch. It’s bleak, yes, but it’s also kind of beautiful.
But then the Alpha infected, “Samson,” returns, and the third act gets loud again. The chaos kicks back in, and Spike makes a choice — he leaves the newborn baby at the village gate, returns to the mainland, and begins whatever the next chapter is going to be. The very last scene, though, is where the movie drops its weirdest bomb: Spike is rescued by a cult dressed like Jimmy Savile. And their leader? An adult Jimmy Crystal with an inverted cross and a chilling smile.
Yeah. That’s the note we’re ending on.
Final Thoughts
28 Years Later is a wild, messy, sometimes brilliant, sometimes baffling piece of horror filmmaking. It doesn’t have the tight, singular focus of the original, and it doesn’t have the relentless tension of 28 Weeks Later. What it does have is ambition — emotional, visual, thematic. It wants to be about grief, about mutation, about how humanity doesn’t just survive — it distorts.
I liked it. I didn’t love it. But I respected it. And in this franchise, that’s worth a lot.