So weird, it ends up working

Film is a bizarre piece of art that's both grotesque and moving

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In the past decade, Hollywood has been bombarded with legacy sequels — delayed franchise entries that typically follow a familiar format, relying on fan service and recognisable characters to attract audiences.

You might assume 28 Years Later will follow suit. You’d be wrong. Instead, director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland (Civil War) follow up their 2002 zombie masterpiece, 28 Days Later, with one of the strangest, most exhilarating blockbusters in recent memory. It’s a truly bizarre piece of art that’s somehow both grotesque and extremely moving.

28 Days Later, in many ways, revolutionised the zombie flick. Shot on grainy digital video, it followed a bike messenger, played by Cillian Murphy, who awakens from a coma to find London decimated by the so-called “rage virus.” Instead of turning people into the classic lumbering undead, this disease transformed them into super-fast maniacs who attack in clusters.

HUMANITY IN SURVIVAL MODE

That, itself, was a new development. But the film was also remarkable for its nightmarish vision of humanity in survival mode, and the ways it imagined heroism and perversion would emerge from the wreckage. Rewatching 28 Days Later in the early days of the Covid-19 lockdown, the film seemed almost prescient.

Boyle and Garland didn’t return for the sequel 28 Weeks Later, an underrated Iraq War metaphor, but they've reunited for Years, which feels in many ways like a direct response to the trauma of the pandemic.