"It was always going to be impossible to match the visual audacity of "28 Days Later," which memorably shot its doomsday outbreak in the haunting fuzz of early digital. Photographed by the legendary Anthony Dod Mantle, it wasn't just that Danny Boyle's zombie-adjacent thriller almost looked like found footage, it was that the images themselves seemed tainted, forever on the brink of self-deletion. So it's all the more remarkable that "28 Years Later," a legacy sequel with unexpected beauty and terror, comes so close."
"The style may be less brazenly iconoclastic, but Boyle, reunited with Mantle, discovered a new language of digital horror yet again. Swapping the Canon XL1 for an iPhone 15 on an assortment of how-did-they-do-that camera rigs, anywhere Boyle wants to put the wide-lensed cameras, he does; the shoulders of new burly infected, the back of drones zooming at head-twisting angles around our protagonists Spike and Jamie, and below the ground as infected bloodily smash their faces into the lens."
"More singular is the horseshoe shaped rig outfitted with 20 iPhones, which lets the visual frame jump through multiple angles with disorienting, time-blurring speed, highlighting kill-shots with frenetic rapture. Despite the carnage, there's jaw-dropping beauty, too. Few scenes this year matched the mythic awe of the mid-film footchase under a canopy of aurora borealis, a crescendo to the way Mantle reminds us that horror needn't be frightened of color."
A year-end craft roundup highlights excellence in cinematography, editing, original score, casting, and other technical and artistic achievements. Anthony Dod Mantle's cinematography for 28 Years Later fuses legacy digital aesthetics with new techniques, replacing a Canon XL1 with iPhone 15s mounted on inventive rigs to place wide-lensed cameras in unconventional positions. Mantle employs drones, shoulder-mounted perspectives, subterranean lenses, and a horseshoe rig of 20 iPhones to create disorienting, time-blurring frames and frenetic kill-shot montages. The cinematography balances visceral carnage with jaw-dropping beauty, culminating in a mid-film footchase beneath an aurora borealis that emphasizes bold color in horror.
Read at Roger Ebert
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