‘28 Years Later’ Craps Out With a Bad Ending (Spoiler Review)

The Plot: A boy goes zombie hunting with his father, then doctor hunting with his mother in a post-apocalyptic England where male aggression is the true contagion.

The Verdict: It’s a bad sign when you walk out of a movie thinking, “Maybe the sequel will redeem it.” That’s where 28 Years Later left me. In the ever-present disconnect between audiences and critics, this is one of those horror films where I found myself siding more with the Popcornmeter than the Tomatometer (where the current scores are 65% and 89%, respectively).

Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland’s long-awaited return to the zombie genre after the seminal 28 Days Later plays like a cross between the recent Netflix miniseries, Adolescence, and last June’s blockbuster, A Quiet Place: Day One. The latter, if you haven’t seen it, is another horror threequel that centers on two characters—one, a woman with cancer—trying to survive in a place overrun by monsters. Here, it’s Jodie Comer and newcomer Alfie Williams instead of Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn.

28 Years Later hits the ground running with an unbearably tense scene where crying children attempt to watch Teletubbies before a zombie horde comes breaking down the door to slaughter them. It’s really 23 years later (since the first movie hit UK theaters in 2002), and England is still infected with the Rage Virus, while Hollywood is still infected with sequelitis. The zombies, however, aren’t all fast-running anymore, as there are now Slow Lows who crawl across the ground at a snail’s pace when they’re not busy eating worms.

There are some good visuals and other tense scenes as 28 Years Later takes us on a coming-of-age journey from a long causeway to the titular “Bone Temple” of the forthcoming sequel (filmed back-to-back with this one, and set to be released six months later, on January 16, 2026). At a certain point, though, the movie runs out of steam, and it starts to feel like Boyle has retreated to franchise filmmaking and a bait-and-switch genre exercise with zombies because he couldn’t get a straight drama like Slumdog Millionaire made anymore. So, instead, he smuggles the character drama into this film and turns it into a rumination on human mortality, toxic masculinity, and post-Brexit isolationism. Skulls, alphas, and regressive islanders abound.

Making zombies socially relevant again is a good aim, but there were times in 28 Years Later where I felt my brain grasping for what the story was supposed to be. It feels like the first act goes on too long, as Williams’ young protagonist, Spike, leaves his island community for a zombie-killing rite of passage on the mainland with his macho dad, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson. We follow their adventures for a while, then the story figures out that it’s really about Spike taking his sick mother, the unsubtly named Isla, to the doctor.

Isla is confined to an upstairs bedroom, where she hurls obscenities at her loved ones, like Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist. She coughs up blood, too, so you could be forgiven for thinking she has the Rage Virus. Maybe the islanders found some new medicine to beat back its worst symptoms (the red eyes and all that), or maybe she’s infected with a new strain that is less aggressive about transforming people into zombies. It would certainly add to her husband’s hypocrisy if he were out there dehumanizing zombie families while he’s got his own infected wife stashed away at home.

These are the kind of narrative possibilities that run through the viewer’s mind while watching 28 Years Later. It’s only natural to consider such explanations when confronted with an illness in a movie about a fictional virus (as opposed to terminal cancer, which is where the move lands before embracing assisted suicide at the drop of a hat). The film’s not interested in fleshing out that part of the mythology, however, and the genre fan who assumes it will stay on-topic might be disappointed.

Case in point: after pivoting to Isla, when 28 Years Later has seemingly established all its character perspectives, it then drops us down in the middle of a chase scene with a bunch of soldiers, giving us no context for who they are or how they relate to the main narrative. The trailer shows them coming ashore in a life raft, but unless I just nodded off for a second and missed it amid the schizophrenic editing, that scene was cut from the theatrical release. (In dialogue, anyhow, it’s later explained that their NATO ship went down off the coast.)

Either way, all but one of the soldiers die, which makes the scene feel pointless except as an action beat. The lone survivor, a Swede named Erik (Edvin Ryding), later shows up to save Spike and Isla from certain death, so maybe Boyle and Garland just didn’t want his arrival to seem like a deus ex machina.

As a character foil, Erik does serve a narrative purpose, since we’re able to see what a “dick” boys like Spike could grow up to be in the outside world. However, Erik is soon killed off, while Taylor-Johnson drops out of the movie almost entirely. This leaves 28 Years Later feeling oddly unfocused, as if it’s introducing more characters than it knows how to juggle. Zombies do shamble, but since when did this franchise become so shambolic?

When I realized where 28 Years Later was going and how similar it was to the aforementioned Adolescence and A Quiet Place: Day One, I started sympathizing with the perspective of audience reviewers who have labeled this “28 Yawns Later.” Then, Jack O’Connell, on loan from Sinners, showed up.

It’s fitting that 28 Years Later has a soundtrack by a group called Young Fathers, and that it was sold, trailer-wise, on the back of a Rudyard Kipling poem (“Boots,” though it may as well be “If,” with its famous line, “You’ll be a Man, my son.”) Yet the movie, which otherwise functions as a pure standalone, essentially ends with what should have been a post-credits scene.

As Spike strikes out on his own, he links up with a gang of zombie killers who are clearly bad news. Their leader, O’Connell’s Sir Jimmy, is the grown version of the sole surviving boy we met in the opening Teletubbies scene. He wears an upside-down-cross necklace as a token of the father who forsook him and his generation’s future for religious madness.

The implication is that Spike (now emancipated from his own philandering father) is entering the manosphere, where he’ll be taken under the wing of the same sadistic guy who left a person strung up in a house, to be eaten alive by zombies earlier. It’s as if we’re watching some alternate version of The Walking Dead where the bat-wielding villain, Negan, became a surrogate father or older brother to young Carl Grimes.

This ending makes sense, thematically, as if Sir Jimmy represents the real virus of male rage in contemporary society. But the way it’s executed, tonally, almost shows a complete disregard for the earnest aesthetic of the movie that came before it. To say nothing of the audience’s time and money.

28 Weeks Later is a movie that people all over Europe, Asia, and the Americas paid to see this weekend, but it’s like the filmmakers themselves succumbed to isolationism and forgot they were making it for anyone outside the UK. The Jimmy Savile costumes at the end seem tailor-made for a British audience, but even if you understand the significance of that creative choice, you still might be baffled. We go from Ralph Fiennes euthanizing a mother and speaking trippingly on the tongue about memento mori to people in tracksuits and bad blonde wigs flipping around killing zombies.

Get a grip, Hollywood.