28 Days Later

Kickoff

Sometimes the scariest thing isn't the virus: it's what survives it. I think that might have been a slugline for 28 Days Later (2002) when it came out; it hasn’t aged well, but like all trend-setters, the follow-ons tend to erode the original value. Before The Last of Us, before the idea of a “rage virus” wormed its way into pop culture, there was 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s lean, grimy, and unexpectedly poetic zombie thriller. It’s a film that doesn’t just imagine the end of civilization: it sits in the eerie silence after the crash, then imagines the chaos that follows.

The more interesting contributor to the project, in retrospect, is Alex Garland. Over time, a clear thesis emerges in his work (men), and his commitment to this thesis is evident in everything he’s written or directed since. Each subsequent work offering a different angle on how men could be rightly interpreted as original sinners in a new world.

We open with Jim (Cillian Murphy), a bicycle courier who wakes up from a coma to discover that London is barren and empty. This isn’t a dreamy Bergman apocalypse. This is “bloody handprints on the hospital wall; a Coke can rolling down an empty street” kind of apocalypse. The opening scenes, shot on digital (hard to watch still!), give London an uncanny quality: like CCTV footage from the end of the world. It's beautiful, it’s terrifying, and it’s not remotely concerned with traditional horror aesthetics. The sound design, zombies approaching swiftly and quietly and without warning, rather than slowly and moaning, is one of the film’s most effective choices.

Boyle, working from Garland’s script, fuses horror with something more unsettling: a morality play about survival, humanity, and control. Jim eventually joins up with Selena (Naomie Harris), who’s the atypical apocalypse survivor with a strict no-nonsense approach: if you're infected, you get a machete to the face. Quickly. Their bond isn’t romantic: it’s strategic, tense, and always a little uncertain. And yet, like everything in this movie, it morphs.

The film’s real terror blooms in the third act, once our group stumbles upon a military outpost promising safety. Enter Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston), who delivers what might be the most unsettling line of the film, not with teeth bared but with calm finality: “I promised them women.” 28 Days Later is a story about how society breaks down, but also about how society is built, and who does the building. Garland fears that the world’s oldest prejudice will survive even the apocalypse, because it’s continually at the root of how we build society.

The acting in the film is understated and effective. Murphy, long before his Oscar win, is wiry, hollow-eyed, and surprisingly tender as Jim. He goes from confused victim to something closer to predator, a transformation the film doesn’t celebrate so much as quietly grieve. Naomie Harris, meanwhile, is competent, commanding, and completely uninterested in the male savior narrative. Their final moments in the film together are both strange and hopeful.

28 Days Later reinvigorated a genre. It’s now being followed by 28 Years Later (2025), a planned first part of a trilogy, which is currently in theaters. I’m excited to see Boyle and Garland team up again, as their early work together was some of the most interesting of the aughts. Garland is a writer with a passing interest in genre and an intense interest in gender politics. Boyle is our foremost narrative anthropologist.

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28 Days Later
Written by Alex Garland; Directed by Danny Boyle
2002
113 minutes
English
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Available to rent on all major services.
You’ll like this if you like: Children of Men (2006), The Road (2009), The Last of Us (2023)