28 Years Later

It may not be storytelling at its best, but you may not care, so stunning is 28 Years Later in how it looks and sounds. The ending is rushed and, a lot of it, an appendage. However, entertained you are – and anticipating what comes next.

This transfixingly nasty, shrewdly postponed sequel to 2002's 28 Days Later finds a knot of survivors ensconced on the island of Lindisfarne where the otherwise endemic Rage virus has yet to reach. It stands as his finest film since 2008's Slumdog Millionaire.

28 Years Later feels like being repeatedly bonked on the head by the metaphor hammer

Boyle and Garland's trip back to this hellscape makes the most of casting a jaundiced, bloodshot eye at our current moment. Their inaugural imagining of a world torn asunder surfed the post-millennial fear that modern society wasn't equipped to handle something truly catastrophic. This new movie is blessed with the knowledge that something always rises from the ashes, but that the risk of regressing back to some fabricated mythology of a Golden Age is there on the surface as well.

"28 Years Later" imagines a Britain that has become so overrun by a zombie virus that few who haven't been infected are left. The resourceful, macho Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his slightly timid 12-year-old son, Spike (Alfie Williams), are among the uninfected villagers who live in a merry commune so tradition-minded that a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II is given a place of honor.