Movie Review – 28 Years Later
Director: Danny Boyle
Starring: Cillian Murphy, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes
Year: 2025
Danny Boyle still has it.
Twenty-three years after 28 Days Later changed horror movies forever, Danny Boyle returns to the infected wasteland of Britain and delivers something that feels both like a continuation and a rebuke of everything zombie movies have become in the interim.
28 Years Later takes place in an England that has been quarantined from the world. The infected still roam but they’re dying out. Humanity has adapted. There are communities now — walled settlements, trading posts, a society built in the ruins. And then there’s the cult.
Cillian Murphy returns as Jim. He’s older. Haunted. Living on the margins of this new world because he can’t — or won’t — integrate into the communities that have formed. Murphy is extraordinary here. He carries the weight of twenty-eight years of survival in his posture, his voice, his eyes. This isn’t the confused bicycle courier from the first film. This is a man who has done things he can’t forget.
The new characters are strong. Jodie Comer plays a woman born after the outbreak — someone who’s never known the world before. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is a community leader with secrets. Ralph Fiennes does Ralph Fiennes villain things except. Well. I won’t spoil it but his character is more complicated than the trailer suggests.
The infected themselves have changed. There aren’t as many but they’ve become something else. More coordinated. More patient. That shot from the trailer — the field full of infected standing still — pays off in terrifying ways. Boyle understands that horror is anticipation. The waiting is worse than the violence.
This is a movie about what happens after survival. When you’ve lived through the worst thing imaginable and then have to figure out how to exist in what’s left. The religious cult element — people who’ve made meaning out of the horror — feels disturbingly plausible. Of course some people would worship this. Of course they’d find transcendence in annihilation.
Alex Garland’s script is sharp. Dialogue-heavy in places, silent in others. There’s a monologue near the end — delivered by Murphy — that’s as good as anything in his career. And the ending. I won’t spoil it. But it’s not what I expected. It’s better than what I expected.
My complaints are minor. The middle section has some pacing issues. There’s a subplot involving one of the settlement factions that doesn’t quite land. And I’m not sure about one creative choice in the third act that I can’t discuss without spoilers but that will definitely be controversial.
But none of that matters much. 28 Years Later is Danny Boyle returning to the thing that launched him into the mainstream and proving he still understands it better than anyone else. This isn’t a nostalgia cash-in. It’s not a legacy sequel coasting on goodwill. It’s a genuine continuation of ideas that deserve continuing.
In a summer full of sequels and reboots and franchise obligations, here’s one that actually justifies its existence.
My rating: ★★★★★
