Over two decades ago, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland pretty much defined how zombies were going to be handled in 21st Century culture with 28 Days Later, the blueprint for everything from World War Z to Zombieland to countless videogames with its wrathful, sprinting undead. Now, 18 years after the mostly Boyle-and-Garland-less 28 Weeks Later, we finally have the pair returning to the genre in threequel 28 Years Later. A bizarre post-apocalyptic vision, it still has the speedy infected and deliberately abrasive digital photography that defined its predecessor, but Boyle and Garland have taken a huge swing away from what you might expect here, making something much less scary and much more strange and mythic. It’s a gamble that does pay off, but not without some serious sacrifice.
After kicking off with a brutal flashback to the early days of the infection (as seen in the trailer, which is in fact true of the vast majority of the film’s conventional ‘scary zombie’ moments), we join 2030 Britain. It’s a country cut off from the world (in a pointed touch, the UK is literally the only place in the world still dealing with zombies), and the community at the film’s heart is also cut off from Britain itself. A small town on Holy Island/Lindisfarne off the coast of Northumberland, accessible only by a tidal causeway, it’s a safe haven against the infected mainland, where Little England traditions reign.
One of these traditions is boys becoming men by heading out to the mainland with a bow and arrows to kill a few infected. Taking on this challenge earlier than usual is 12 year old Spike (Alfie Williams), accompanied by his gung-ho dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) while his deliriously ill mother Isla (Jodie Comer) waits at home. This early hunt (along with a later ill-fated expedition into the UK by a Swedish navy team) is Years at its most action-heavy, grisly and impactful with some brilliantly gross and oppressive sound design.
It’s in this action that you can find the most hints of Garland’s own directing work creeping into Boyle’s down-and-dirty digital misery sensibilities; the videogamey-ness of Civil War and Warfare (the zombie are even broken down into game-style classes) and the folk horror of Men are front and centre often. While they make for a solid visual and stylistic fit, the tone of Years is often all over the place, sometimes viscerally realistic, sometimes more surreal and transcendent, and sometimes just plain goofy. Though these modes don’t mesh all that well, there is something compelling about the way they collide into one another, each new character on the mainland dragging the blissfully ignorant Spike into a new corner of the human psyche.
Fuelled by an intense soundtrack from Scottish duo Young Fathers, it’s always fascinating to see what’s around the next corner, especially after the introduction of Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes). A GP from the ‘old days’, Kelson is always, by design, out of place in Years, a man who has combined science and occult superstition to survive in his hand-built temple of skulls and bones and often literally glows yellow due to covering himself in iodine to avoid infection. It’s a very fun performance from Fiennes, who brings the necessary gravitas to quite a silly (and not actually very often all that *scary*) story.
28 Years Later is part one of a possibly three, and definitely at least two, part series, and you do get the sense of quite a lot of table-setting happening in acts two and three. Often, I’d be against this sort of thing but, after an ending so genuinely berserk that I couldn’t really believe what I was looking at, I’m fully locked in to what I hope is a full new trilogy. It puts an insane little bow on what is already a rich ‘state of the nation’ satire on mad, isolated, and forgetful modern Britain, something so intentionally divisive that I can’t believe a studio signed off on it and that I respect the hell out of Boyle and Garland for even trying.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 