#28-years-later

#28-years-later

It's a traditional-enough opening for many an interview: "so-and-so can do anything!" But "anything" can carry a lot of water. Harder is actually doing anything, and doing it well. Nia DaCosta can do anything and do it very well indeed - family drama, hard-hitting horror reboot, MCU entry, inventive adaptation - and so it's understandable that she likes to take a little break between all those different things.

Yet things somehow don't feel impossibly bleak. The marketing for the previous film ( one of 2025's best) leaned hard on eerie visuals like terrifying towers of bones and an orange-tinted Fiennes, looking unhinged. Once you saw the movie, though, the truth behind those images gave them an unexpected beauty: Those bones were actually meant as an ossuary, a memorial for those lost to the Rage virus, and Fiennes's character was a kindly doctor doing his best in dire times.

Set the titular time after the virus that decimated England, Boyle shot his film on iPhones, included more prosthetic penises than seems reasonable, and even embedded a Brexit commentary in his action flick. At its core, it's a traditional coming-of-age action narrative about a young man who discovers that not only is the world unsafe but that adults in it will betray you, but it's also just a visually stunning piece of work, a movie that looks like nothing else that played in a multiplex this year.

Back in 2002, screenwriter Garland and director Boyle had a monster hit with their post-apocalyptic horror thriller 28 Days Later, about a rage virus that leaks from a lab.

We had this thing about, No, they're not zombies. They're infected. We wanted them to behave in a different way physically, but they also weren't undead. They could die and they will die, but so will you if they catch you.