Critics have at last weighed in on Alex Garland and Danny Boyle‘s new zombie horror movie 28 Years Later ahead of its release in UK cinemas on Friday, 20 June.
A follow-up to the ‘great’ 2002 film 28 Days Later, Boyle and Garland assembled a star-studded cast including Harry Potter star Ralph Fiennes, 62, and fellow Brit Aaron Taylor-Johnson, for their latest endeavour.
Two decades on from the original which saw a deadly virus plague London, the new movie finds a group of survivors living on the secluded island of Lindisfarne, where the virus is yet to reach.
Boyle and Garland’s new project has received a heap of positive reviews from critics following early screenings.
Rotten Tomatoes have handed the movie an impressive 94 percent critic approval rating after rounding up reviews from more than 91 film reviewers.
Critics have at last weighed in on Alex Garland and Danny Boyle ‘s new zombie horror movie 28 Years Later ahead of its release in UK cinemas on Friday 20 June
23 years on from the original which saw a deadly virus plague London, the new movie finds a group of survivors living on the secluded island of Lindisfarne, where the virus is yet to reach (Pictured: Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Jamie and Alfie Williams as Spike)
The Daily Mail’s Brian Viner was incredibly impressed after watching Garland and Boyle’s latest effort, dubbing the movie the ‘best post-apocalyptic horror-thriller film I have ever watched’.
Brian wrote: ‘With the terrifying and electrifying 28 Years Later, director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland have delivered the best post-apocalyptic survivalist horror-thriller film I have ever seen. Which sounds like limited praise, yet it’s a much more crowded field than you might think.’
Robbie Collin in The Telegraph also handed 28 Years Later a rave review, with the critic handing the ‘terrifying’ horror movie five stars out of five.
‘Garland employs a strain of peculiarly British pulp humour – very 2000 AD, very Warhammer 40,000 – to undercut the ambient dread,’ Collin wrote.
‘And flashes of Arthurian fantasias and wartime newsreel footage (as well as a pointed double cameo for the now-felled Sycamore Gap tree_ serve as regularly nudges in the ribs as he and Boyle ty with the notion of a 21st century British national myth.’
The film too received five stars from The Times critic Ed Potton, who hailed Jodie Comer’s ‘impressive as always’ performance.
The journalist wrote: ‘Is this the most beautiful zombie film of them all? It’s hard to think of another that combines such wonder and outlandishness with the regulation flesh-rending, brain-munching and vicious disembowelment.’
The BBC‘s Caryn James handed the highly-anticipated film four stars out of five as she dubbed Ralph Fiennes’s performance ‘scene-stealing’.
’28 Years Later is part zombie-apocalypse horror, part medieval world buildling, part sentimental family story and – most effectively – part Heart of Darkness in its journey towards a madman in the woods.
Ralph Fiennes stars in the movie as Dr. Kelson, with critics praising the actor’s ‘scene-stealing’ performance
The BBC’s Caryn James handed the highly-anticipated film four stars out of five as she dubbed Ralph Fiennes’s performance ‘scene-stealing’
Spike (left) – played by Alfie Williams who has been dubbed a ‘gem’ by critics – is a 12-year-old boy whose mother Isla (Jodie Comer) is unwell, confused and depressed
‘It glows with Boyle’s visual flair, Garland’s ambitious screenplay and a towering performance from Ralph Fiennes, whose character enters halfway through the film and unexpectedly becomes its fraught sole’.
Empire also awarded 28 Years Later four stars out of five, with journalist Ben Travis writing: ‘ 28 Years Later is ferocious, fizzing with adrenaline. The mainland thrums with a pervasive sense of immediate danger; when the infected arrive (and, do they arrive), it is breathlessly tense.’
Reviews in The Guardian and The Independent were slightly more critical however, with journalists scoring 28 Years Later with three stars.
Peter Bradshaw wrote in The Guardian: ‘A little awkwardly, the film has to get us on to the mainland for some badass action sequences with real shooting weaponry – and then we have the two ‘alpha’ cameos that it would be unsporting to reveal, but which cause the film to shunt between deep sadness and a bizarre, implausible (though certainly startling) graphic-novel strangeness.’
While Clarisse Loughley wrote in The Independent: ‘Even if 28 Years Later feels like being repeatedly bonked on the head by the metaphor hammer, Boyle’s still a largely compelling filmmaker, and the film separates itself from the first instalment by offering something distinctly more sentimental and mythic than before.’
28 Years Later has become the best horror ticket pre-seller of 2025, with the film expected to gross around $30million in its first weekend.
28 Years Later: ‘Savage, scary but this hellish vision of Zombie Britain is electrifying’
By Brian Viner
With the terrifying and electrifying 28 Years Later, director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland have delivered the best post-apocalyptic survivalist horror-thriller film I have ever seen. Which sounds like limited praise, yet it’s a much more crowded field than you might think.
Boyle also made the 2002 film 28 Days Later, setting up the story (written by Garland) of a terrible virus rampaging through Britain, which in those days was more the stuff of science-fiction than it seems now.
There was a sequel, 28 Weeks Later (2007), but that had a different director and writer. Now, Boyle and Garland have reunited to mighty effect.
There’s no need to have seen the first two films – this one stands alone.
The Daily Mail’s Brian Viner has described 28 Years Later as a ‘hellish vision of Zombie Britain’
The movie’s cast has received much praise during early viewings, with Viner describing their performing as ‘marvellous’
It begins with a crowd of kids watching Teletubbies, who I must say always seemed a bit creepy to me, not that Tinky Winky and co deserve the shrieking dissonance of what comes next, as a gang of the ‘infected’ burst in. Unlike Covid, this virus turns its victims into zombie-like creatures, sending them mad with hunger and murderous rage.
We are then whisked forward 28 years to Holy Island off the coast of Northumberland, where 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) lives with his macho father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor Johnson), and terribly sick and bedridden mother, Isla (Jodie Comer).
The mainland, across the causeway, is rife with the disease, but this place is still free of it. Although it’s the near future, the small community on the island has been plunged back into a medieval way of life; Spike doesn’t recognise an iPhone or a frisbee.
Although Spike is not really old enough, Jamie is certain the boy is ready to experience his first kill. So, equipped with bows and arrows, father and son cross to the mainland where, scavenging and slaughtering, the infected roam.
‘Boyle choreographs this perilous mission superbly, ingeniously splicing it with eclectic clips of old newsreel footage and long-ago movies’, writes the critic
Boyle choreographs this perilous mission superbly, ingeniously splicing it with eclectic clips of old newsreel footage and long-ago movies, such as Laurence Olivier as Henry V leading his archers into battle at Agincourt. Arrows in those days were meant for the French. Now the enemy is within.
All this will be too gruesome and scary for some, but it is propulsive, edge-of-the-seat story-telling at its finest, and only gets more gripping when Spike later returns to the mainland with his ailing mum, searching for the eccentric doctor (Ralph Fiennes) he has heard about, who might have the right medicine for her.
Boyle is wonderfully served by his cast. Taylor-Johnson, Comer and Fiennes are all marvellous, as, briefly at the end, setting up the next film, is Jack O’Connell.
But if anyone steals the show it’s young Williams, a feature-film newcomer not outplayed for one second by his illustrious elders.
