Alan in Belfast: 28 Years Later – after a long wait, both the zombies and the uninfected humans have evolved in worrying ways (UK and Irish cinemas from 19 June)

For anyone not old enough to have seen the first two films (2002 and 2007) in the expanding franchise, 28 Years Later opens with a recap of the awful effects of zombies staggering and at times running amok across Great Britain. Three decades later, the whole British ‘mainland’ is quarantined, coastal waters are patrolled by international navy vessels to make sure no one escapes to infect continental Europe, and some of the (mostly naked) undead have evolved to run and demonstrate almost superhuman strength.

The action shifts out of the city to a sizeable community who are now living on the tidal Holy Island (Lindisfarne) with its long causeway and round the clock watchtower to keep any ‘infected’ at bay. For his male coming of age rite, 12-year-old Spike accompanies his father over to the mainland to be blooded. Armed only with bows and arrows, the young lad passage into adulthood involves learning that much truth has been forsaken and he is being lied to. (Welcome to ‘Nation Building Under Duress 101’.) The bulk of the film then follows Spike’s quest to get his mother treatment for her feverish hallucinations and debilitating ill health.

I signed off my June 2007 musings about 28 Weeks Later wondering if I’d have the stomach to go a 28 Months Later sequel. (I speculated that it might be called Vingt huit mois plus tard, but Alex Garland and Danny Boyle have neatly side-stepped the viral spread to Paris.)

If there were any jump scares, they didn’t trouble me as a nervous cinemagoer who normally avoids anything remotely related to the horror genre. This morning’s early screening may have helped: 10am in Queen’s Film Theatre is a fabulous time and place to start your day with two hours of zombies.

Instead, 28 Years Later comes across as quite an intelligent film with Alex Garland’s script asking what love and a good death means in a brutal world, and looking through the eyes of Erik the outsider who has dropped into the madness and is coming to terms with the post-apocalyptic abyss. While the community is led by a woman, it’s the men who seem to be exclusively trained up as warriors. Zombies didn’t manage to kill off the patriarchy. You can also view some of the worldbuilding, nationalism and isolation fortress mentality though a post-Brexit and post-Covid lens.

Director Danny Boyle makes heavy use of flashbacks not only to fill in characters’ backstories, but to show centuries-old history repeating itself. Great performances from Alfie Williams as Spike, Ralph Fiennes as a maligned and misunderstood Dr Kelson (with a nuanced view on humanity that beautifully extends beyond everyone else’s ‘othering’), and Jodie Comer as Spike’s vulnerable mum Isla. Flawed father figure Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) will surely have to get his just comeuppance in a later episode.

Teletubbies are terrifying, a troubling cultish character is belatedly introduced with more than a whiff of a dead and disgraced DJ/TV personality (who seems to be set up for a major part in the second in the set of three sequels that are being made), and a few shots in the film have become a tribute to the now felled Sycamore Gap tree along Hadrian’s Wall. Young Fathers’ score perhaps tries too hard to accentuate already cinematic moments. Surround sound effects are used so sparingly that they momentarily divert attention from the action when they occur. The substantial filming on an iPhone 15 is disguised by the use of rigs with proper lenses and bullet-time kill sequences.

28 Years Later is released on Thursday 19 June and is being screened in Queen’s Film Theatre as well as nearly every multiplex around.