Thirty years after he burst onto the scene as an enfant terrible of the music-video generation, Danny Boyle has aged into one of the foremost bards of contemporary Britain. The director established this reputation early on with Trainspotting, which embodies the go-go energy of the mid-’90s, and cemented it by directing the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games, a feature-length extravaganza of pre-Brexit patriotism. His latest film, 28 Years Later — which, like its predecessor 28 Days Later, is a collaboration with writer Alex Garland — marks the clearest distillation yet of Boyle’s long-running interest in British national identity. Or, in this case, identities. Lurking in the background of this zombie thriller is the setup for a battle between two distinct visions of Britishness: Heritage Britain, a humble, stiff-upper-lip culture rooted deeply in the past, and a demented version of Modern Britain, full of pop-culture-obsessed chavs with twisted moral compasses.
The film takes place in the near future, decades after Britain is ravaged by the zombie plague introduced in the first movie. It’s recent enough that the pre-virus days are not entirely out of living memory but long ago enough that isolated bands of survivors have begun to create their own micro-societies. One such community is the island where Spike (Alfie Williams), the film’s 12-year-old protagonist, lives with his parents, Jamie (Aaron Taylor Johnson) and Isla (Jodie Comer). Though its depiction in the film includes hefty CGI, the island is a real place: Lindisfarne, otherwise known as Holy Island, a tidal island off the coast of northern England connected to the mainland by a causeway that appears only at low tide.
The setting is not an accident. Lindisfarne holds an important place in ancient British history, both for its role in the development of Christianity (the island’s monks shepherded the Church through the chaos of the post-Roman era) and as one of the first places in Britain to be ravaged by Vikings. Luckily, the zombies in 28 Years Later have yet to invent longboats, so the island society has been able to endure, albeit on a semi-permanent war footing. Much of the imagery in the island scenes feels drawn from World War II Britain. Living in an isolated refuge cut off from the violence and devastation that prevails just across the water, the islanders are not unlike the country’s popular imagination of itself from the war. Accordingly, the Holy Island’s community is in many ways a revival of the spirit of the Blitz, emphasizing the virtues of shared sacrifice.
But Boyle and Garland also invest the Holy Island scenes with a feeling of even deeper history. One of the film’s most stirring sequences arrives as Jamie and Spike embark on the latter’s first trip to the mainland. Boyle cuts to a rapid-fire montage of archival footage from British military history and clips from Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (itself a piece of WWII propaganda) set to a recording of the Rudyard Kipling poem “Boots” read by actor Taylor Holmes more than a century ago. The point is to position Jamie and Spike in a historical lineage as the latest in a line of soldiers stretching back centuries. Lest you read this purely straightforwardly — two more brave men crossing the sea to do what needs to be done — Holmes’s frenzied delivery, as well as the fact that the mission now largely consists of murdering zombies who are crawling harmlessly along the ground, adds an appropriate touch of unease to the imperial echoes.
Other elements of island society heighten the sense that the inhabitants have tapped into an innate, timeless Britishness. Lacking modern technology, the islanders are forced to rely on medieval weaponry like the longbow favored by English armies in the days of the real Henry V. There are also stray hints that they have reverted to a sort of folk mythology, as seen in the creepy masks they employ — a pale face with bloody eyes, which seems to be a reminder of the ever-present danger posed by the Infected or perhaps are part of a humiliation ritual. Here Boyle and Garland are in conversation with what English actor and author Mark Gatiss calls “folk horror.” Although the term can be applied to films from around the globe, folk horror for Gatiss is a specific cinematic subgenre that arose in the U.K. in the ’60s and ’70s marked by “an obsession with the British landscape, its horror and superstitions.” Think The Wicker Man or the cult favorite Witchfinder General. (Modern examples include Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England, though basically every folk-horror film could be called A Field in England.)
Once Jamie and Spike reach the mainland, the film becomes similarly fascinated with the natural world. Boyle pays keen attention to the unhewn landscape of the North East, from its dense forests and verdant rapeseed fields to the northern lights in the sky. At one point, he even includes England’s most famous tree. Later, Spike and Isla will pass the Angel of the North and remark on how the sight of the statue connects everyone who looks at it, whether in the distant past or hundreds of years into the future. This landscape will endure past the death of civilization. And it endures perhaps because of the death of civilization: In real life, that tree has since been felled by local miscreants.
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This vision holds up until the film’s closing scene, when Boyle and Garland present us with a competing model of postapocalyptic Britain. Through his time on the mainland, Spike learns the islanders are not the only surviving humans in the area. There’s also Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who attempts a peaceful coexistence with the zombies and preaches the gospel of impermanence. But at the literal last minute, the film undergoes an unexpected tonal shift with the introduction of Jimmy (Jack O’Connell), a character who symbolizes a Britishness very different from the Heritage fantasy. Jimmy is an over-the-top parody of Modern Britain — or at least a version of Modern Britain as it might have looked had it been frozen in 2002, the year of 28 Days Later’s release.
Jimmy and his gang, who are all called Jimmy, pop up just before the credits roll to save Spike from becoming zombie food. They sport matching tracksuits, which, as someone who was bopping around Nottingham that summer, I can confirm was the coolest thing anyone in 2002 Britain could ever wear. Pop culture is the Jimmys’ mother tongue: They learned their fighting moves from the Power Rangers, and their theme song is a metal remix of the Teletubbies theme. In the film’s darkest joke, they have taken their name and their aesthetic from Jimmy Savile, the popular BBC entertainer who was exposed as a prolific child predator after his death in 2011.
Even if we hadn’t seen suggestions that they spend their free time indulging in torture, it’s clear the Jimmys are not the first people you’d prefer to meet in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. To those who idealize the humble bravery of the Blitz era, they represent everything gone wrong with Britain since the good times (whenever they were) ended. They’re violent, obnoxious overgrown children who have no community or interests besides the media they consume. Here too Boyle and Garland are working in an established vein of British horror: the so-called “Broken Britain” films of the late aughts. Movies like Harry Brown played on fears of a youthful underclass — variously called chavs, hoodies, or ASBOs — rising up to terrorize the adults in their midst. Assuming the Jimmys will take a bigger role in 28 Years Later’s forthcoming sequel, Nia DaCosta’s The Bone Temple, that’s very bad news indeed.
There’s another intriguing difference between the islanders and the Jimmys. As far as I can tell, the island is 100 percent white, while the Jimmys are as ethnically diverse as Britain really is. It’s a reminder that the manufactured imagery of Heritage Britain is not politically neutral. Thatcher’s ’80s were full of nostalgia for the good old days of the war, and in the run-up to Brexit, the Leave campaign played on the historic image of an isolated, independent island to great success. Heritage Britain may be the face the U.K. presents to the world, but the Jimmys, British culture’s debased stepchildren, have an equal claim to the true national character. If only we didn’t have to wait until the sequel to see which one comes out on top.
