28 Years Later Review – Rage Evolves, But the Story Stumbles

Review: 28 Years Later

Rating: ★★½ (2.5/5)

By Travis Brown | Horror Movies Uncut

Twenty-eight years after rage first broke loose across the UK, director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland return to the genre they helped rewire—with a sequel that’s part apocalyptic slow burn, part fever-dream fumble. 28 Years Later wants to evolve the franchise. It just doesn’t always know how.

Set in the eerie quiet of post-collapse Scotland, the film centers on Spike (Alfie Williams), a curious kid trying to understand the fractured adults around him. His mother Isla (Jodie Comer) is bedridden and unwell—mentally, physically, emotionally—while her partner Aaron (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) shoulders the burden of keeping their fragile unit intact. But survival isn’t just about staying hidden. When the tides go down and a path to the mainland reopens, the outside world starts seeping in—and with it, the return of the infected.

Boyle leans heavy on dread and isolation. The landscapes are stunning and bleak, with crashing waves and desolate moors that feel more haunted than hostile. The first half hums with tension as memory, grief, and fear clash inside this broken family. But then the virus mutates—and so does the film.

28 Years Later introduces a controversial twist: the infected have evolved. The film hints at a hierarchy—alphas among the horde. They’re stronger, faster, more organized. The implication? They’re thinking now. Some sequences even suggest they’re breeding. It’s bold. But it’s also… a lot.

These aren’t just infected—they’re symbolic now, mutated metaphors for generational trauma, broken systems, and the primal fear of what humanity might become when all rules collapse. But the more the film leans into world-building, the more it loses the emotional thread. The personal story gets pushed aside in favor of sci-fi escalation that feels pulled from Resident Evil or The Girl with All the Gifts.

There are moments that work. The return to Scotland’s rugged coastlines feels like a nod to classic British ghost stories—tales of isolated islands and creeping tides that trap you in time. Boyle still knows how to shoot despair like no one else. The score, reusing and reimagining that iconic theme, still hits like a gut punch. And Comer, even in limited moments, conveys haunting weight.

But 28 Years Later suffers from tonal whiplash. It wants to be intimate and mythic, human and monstrous. It nods toward historical wounds, with archival footage and symbolic references to Scotland’s resistance, but it never commits long enough to make it feel earned. The ending, particularly, lands with a thud—more setup than payoff, teasing a franchise expansion rather than resolving the story we came to see.

28 Years Later is a fascinating misfire—ambitious but inconsistent. Spike’s journey, and the world around him, deserved something more focused. As a continuation of a groundbreaking saga, it leans too hard into mutation and myth without grounding us in the emotional stakes that made 28 Days Later so powerful.

Final Score: 2.5 out of 5

It wants to bite. It just doesn’t know where to sink its teeth.