FILM
28 YEARS LATER
DANNY BOYLE’S ZOMBIE NATION
Shakespearean skullduggery: Spike (Alfie Williams) and Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes).
KEEP 'EM PEELED
In one scene (not the one above), Ralph Fiennes’ Dr Kelson holds a skull and references Hamlet. Back in 1995, Fiennes won a Tony award for playing Hamlet on Broadway.
★★★★
OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 115 MINS
DIRECTOR Danny Boyle
CAST Alfie Williams, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes
PLOT Raised in a survivors’ colony on Holy Island, 12-year-old Spike (Williams) takes a rite-of-passage trip to the infection-ravaged English mainland with his dad (Taylor-Johnson).
DANNY BOYLE AND Alex Garland have never made obvious choices. Take 2002’s 28 Days Later in which they — Boyle as director, Garland as screenwriter — revolutionised zombie cinema with sprinting, blood-vomiting hordes. (Okay, technically ‘infected’, not reanimated-corpse zombies). It reinvigorated not just the walking dead, but grand, apocalyptic storytelling in the public consciousness. Over two decades later, end-of-the-world stories are old news — fungal armageddons and civilisation-razing outbreaks are mainstream TV fare. But with 28 Years Later, Boyle and Garland return (they were largely uninvolved with 2007’s Weeks) to breathe thrilling life back into an overexposed genre. There isn’t an obvious choice in sight.