There’s a harrowing prologue to 28 Years Later that immediately alerts the audience to the film’s deliberately disorienting narrative and style. It doesn’t pay off until the final, brief scene — and even then only works if you’ve been tracking the significance of a cross necklace that passes from the hands of a dying Anglican priest to a traumatized blonde boy, his son, who reappears at the end as a very peculiar blonde man.
What happened to make the boy grow up to be such a strange fellow? Well, living through a zombie apocalypse does all sorts of things to people.
And yeah, I know — they’re not technically zombies, as director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland keep insisting in interviews. If you recall the highly influential first apocalyptic horror film in the series created by Boyle and Garland, 28 Days Later (2002) — and who among us does not? — you know they’re the “infected,” carriers of the “rage virus” that kicked off a catastrophic modern pandemic across the United Kingdom, leaving few survivors.
The prologue puts the film’s focus on children growing up in a time of horror and how they’re warped by their parents within the confines of small survivor communities. As in 28 Days Later, the film critiques a disastrously patriarchal legacy stoked by disaster and collapse of civilization — retrograde masculinity obsessed with violent control, procreation, and the subjugation of women, with crude militarism running alongside a resurgent warrior culture.
The survivors live mostly on rural, isolated Holy…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
