28 Years Later

★★★★☆

119 min | R | June 20, 2025 | Sony Pictures Releasing

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland return to the Rage virus twenty-eight years later. Britain is sealed off. The infected have evolved. So have the survivors.

Zombie films are exhausted. The genre has been strip-mined for every possible variation on the undead. 28 Years Later succeeds by refusing to be a zombie film. This is post-apocalyptic coming-of-age horror about what happens to humanity when civilization collapses and never returns. A young boy named Spike lives on a fortified island. His mother is sick. He journeys to the mainland for medicine and discovers both the infected and the survivors have become something new and terrible.

Alfie Williams plays Spike with vulnerability and resourcefulness. He anchors the film as the audience surrogate discovering a world we last saw twenty-eight years ago. Jodie Comer plays a survivor with secrets and shows range beyond her usual intensity. Aaron Taylor-Johnson brings physicality and menace to a role that requires both. Ralph Fiennes appears as a doctor and delivers work that elevates every scene. Jack O’Connell creates something genuinely unsettling.

Danny Boyle shoots with the same kinetic energy he brought to 28 Days Later but the film is more controlled and deliberate. Alex Garland’s script does real work exploring how societies form in the absence of institutions. The infected are not the real horror. The film understands that people are always the real monsters. The practical effects are strong. The violence is brutal and consequential.

This is a worthy continuation of a franchise that redefined zombie horror. The film respects what came before while finding new territory to explore. Boyle and Garland prove they still have things to say about rage and survival and the cost of both.