28 Years Later: Danny Boyle imagines a dark British future in a thrilling expansion of his zombie classic

Forget about the Queen, James Bond, and the NHS: the centrepiece of Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics was the industrial revolution. 28 Years Later is a zombie film, just about, but it is far more so a vision of Britain in a future Dark Age that resembles the distant past, not only pre-industrial but practically pre-English, a lawless land of warring tribes. The unhappy family at its centre, twelve-year old Spike (Alfie Williams), father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and bedbound mother Isla (Jodie Comer), belong to a community of survivors on Lindisfarne, a mytho-historical site both as a cradle of Christian civilisation from the seventh century, and as the site of one of the first Viking raids at the end of the eighth. Accessible to the mainland only at low tide, by a single causeway, Holy Island (its other name) sustains a degraded version of life in 2002, supplemented by innovations made necessary by the ever-present danger over the waters.

In the first part of the film, Jamie and Spike go across to turn the boy into a hunter or warrior. Like all island men he has had to become skilled in archery – and here again Boyle reaches into the distant, though less distant past, more than once interpolating shots of the English archers at Agincourt in 1415, directly from Laurence Olivier’s film of Henry V (1945), sometimes accompanied by a reading of Kipling’s strangely Futurist-sounding poem Boots. These scenes in the abandoned countryside are as scary as anything in the first film, introducing new kinds of zombie (though none, apparently, are big swimmers), and the section ends back at the causeway with a fantastic display of the Northern Lights, thrillingly set to Wagner. The zombies are zombies, but might as well be Vikings themselves, or at any rate the Vikings of myth, in particular the almost unkillable berserker who does far more than merely infect his victims. All of this is done with great verve, but Boyle is not in the faux-modest business of making what Manny Farber called “termite art”: he is aiming for something richer and much stranger, and he hits his mark.

Jamie is brave and resourceful, and the settlement depends on the martial skills he is passing on to his son, but Boyle and his screenwriter Alex Garland subtly show how far this has brutalised him, well before matters come to a head. Back on Lindisfarne, Jamie is cock of the walk, but Spike is sensitive and finds island life stifling. What ails his mother is initially unclear, and so Spike takes her across, without permission, to locate the reputedly mad Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes). Comer, doing a Geordie accent, is magnificent; Fiennes too. Though this section, which has something of Children of Men (2006) about it, feels unresolved at the film’s end, since it is to be followed by a sequel. It hinges on our attitudes to birth and death, and so – it seems likely – on the Christian inheritance.

Along the way Isla and Spike encounter a Swedish marine, Erik (Edvin Ryding), who makes explicit the film’s past-and-future subtext. The British Isles, we learn early on, have been quarantined and the seas are patrolled by the world’s navies. The Swedes have managed to get shipwrecked and Erik laments the mundane life and Insta-posing girlfriend he left behind, in a scene with some completely out-of-the-blue and irresistible laugh lines – while also calling himself a Viking. The uninfected world Erik evokes has startlingly little to recommend it: if this is a Brexit allegory, it is a distinctly ambiguous one. But this ambiguity is typical of Garland, whose characters are positively attracted by violence and liberated by disorder. The film as a whole is filled with resonant imagery, from ancient history, from COVID, from other movies, which is given shape but not meant to provide a single definitive meaning.

All of this plays out in some of the most beautiful and – in movie terms – neglected landscape that the country has to offer, in Northumberland. The most famous sequence in the first film showed the streets of London empty, but here there are very few images of urban or industrial Britain, few even of evident human settlement – there are two shots of the now-felled sycamore by Hadrian’s Wall. Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle give us frenetic chases and many “bullet-time” slayings, but they are as interested in the proverbial wind in the trees, and the shadows of clouds, revealing an isle of wonders indeed.