The U.K. is isolated, as European leaders seek to beat off the instability and irrationality radiating from the British Isles. The country is in a state of industrial decay. Amid the collapse, the people spiritually sustain themselves on faded glory: St. George’s Cross, stiff upper lips, Kipling and memories of empire. The country’s remnant elites, meanwhile, are old and impotent, offering managed multicultural decline and “death with dignity.”
That about sums up the portrait of Britain painted by director Danny Boyle in his latest zombie-apocalypse sequel, 28 Years Later. The film is an example of the serious-horror genre that emerged in the mid-2010s, and increasingly serves as a home for filmmakers with something to say about Society. In this case, Boyle extends current U.K. trends to their dismaying terminus: the self-destruction of one of the world’s great civilizations.
The film’s power, however, lies in its political ambivalence: 28 Years Later’s vision of decline can mirror the grievances of Guardian-reading, Radio 4-listening “Remoaners”—people like Boyle himself, who recently all but disavowed his Best Picture-winning 2008 blockbuster, Slumdog Millionaire, over cultural appropriation. Nor has he been shy about his disdain for Brexit. And yet, 28 Years Later’s vision of what British restoration might involve is starkly, unsettlingly, blood-and-soil.
28 Years Later is a father-and-son Bildungsroman wrapped in zombie horror. A young boy, Spike (Alfie Williams in a heartbreaking turn), lives with his tough-guy dad, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and ailing mum, Isla (Jodie Comer), on Lindisfarne, an island just off Northumberland, connected to the mainland by a fortified causeway. The people of the island maintain a semi-primitive existence—part Sparta, part Merry England. This keeps them distinctly human, while the Rage Virus has turned most people on the mainland into mindless zombies. The rest of Europe, we learn early on, has contained the virus.
Against the advice of Isla and the village elders, Jamie takes Spike on a scavenger hunt on the mainland. As they cross the causeway, we hear an eerie rendition of Kipling’s “Boots” as the present-tense events are intercut with stock historical footage of Blitz-era mobilization and Olivier’s Henry V—get it? Englishmen still delude themselves about this stuff, the film seems to suggest, even as their country has regressed to literal barbarism.
Father and son barely survive the initial scavenger hunt as they are almost overwhelmed by an “Alpha”— a leader zombie who far outstrips the rest in speed, strength, animal cunning, and sheer brutality. Back home, Spike becomes aware, for the first time, of his father’s shortcomings: his penchant for fibbing, his infidelity to Isla.
Here, the film reveals an acute and currently unpopular psychoanalytic insight. Jamie’s descent—from sexually rivalrous super-father to lousy, human-scale dad—spurs Spike’s entrance to responsible manhood, as well as the rest of the plot. Once exposed, the father’s failings help the boy relate to authority in a reasonable way: to accept authority where it is just and challenge it when unjust. The father, as authority’s representative, is neither so weak as to impel the boy to neurotically punish himself, nor so all-powerful as to make him turn against the world in rebellion. The paternal function still works, and the family remains the primary unit of socialization—even amid the wider breakdown of civilization.
Which would be unremarkable in 28 Years Later unless we recall that our current civilization generally holds that the family is infinitely malleable, that the paternal function is dispensable, and that this old-fashioned version of Freudianism is passé.
In any event, Spike can no longer take his father at his word, not least when it comes to his mother’s illness. Having spotted a fire on the mainland during that initial excursion, Spike learns that it must be the work of Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), a physician who’s somehow survived the zombie takeover. And so the boy brings his mother to the dangerous mainland to find Kelson in the hope that he can save her (from cancer, it turns out).
On the mainland, he must protect his addled mother with little more than bow and arrows; she, in her delirium, takes to calling him “Daddy,” as if to ratify his passage out of boyhood. Meanwhile, a squad of Swedish marines enforcing Britain’s quarantine has been forced to land on the island and battle their way through the zombie hordes. They have sophisticated weapons and mobile phones, while the barbarous Brits eat each other’s brains—the zombie-flick version of the anti-Brexit lament that “we used to be able to zip through the E.U. passport line at Charles de Gaulle.”
From here, though, the film’s unresolved politics divide into two contradictory paths in response to the question: How must Britain endure?
One is the path of multicultural comity and palliative liberalism, represented by Dr. Kelson, a figure from Britain’s old—meaning, current—elite. Having been rescued by the last remaining Swedish marine, Spike and Isla happen upon a pregnant zombie as she gives birth to an (apparently) normal human baby. The marine shoots the zombie-mum and Isla takes the baby before they’re confronted by the newborn’s father, an Alpha zombie: huge, muscular, with an enormous penis and features that are—unmistakably, unquestionably—South Asian. After unceremoniously decapitating the marine, the Alpha gives chase to Spike and Isla, who are saved in the nick of time by the man they’ve been searching for: Kelson.
Kelson knows the Alpha and has even given the zombie a name. His method for dealing with the creature is to sedate him and run away. But why not strangle the Alpha, or decapitate him, or stab him in the heart while he’s down? The gentle Kelson is apparently resigned to this new phase in Britain’s development. The fire spotted by Spike on his first visit is used by the doctor to burn the countless corpses strewn about the country, whose skulls he fashions into towering statues: Memento mori.
The best Kelson can offer Isla is euthanasia by poisoning (a concoction he steadfastly refuses to use on the Alpha). She accepts her fate happily, and Spike adds her skull to Kelson’s grim memorial. His Majesty’s Government might be gone, the Trident nuclear deterrent presumably under foreign control, but the Leadbeater Bill is still in effect, offing Anglo women while others bear children for well-endowed, virile Pakistani zombies.
But there is a second way, represented by Jimmy—a character we first meet in the film’s prologue, when his village in the Scottish Highlands is overrun by zombies in the initial takeover. Rather than fight, Jimmy’s father, the local minister, happily embraces death-by-zombie as a prelude to the events foretold in Revelation. Now, twenty-eight years later, Jimmy leads a gang of misfits who fight the zombies with brutal relish.
Notably, Jimmy wears an upside-down cross—not so much a satanic symbol as it is a willful, pagan inversion of the Christian values that undergird democratic egalitarianism, as if to sneer, “Look where your Imago Dei brought you.” And by the film’s end, there is no question which path the warlike Spike chooses. It is not Kelson’s. Despite Boyle’s own loudly professed progressivism, his story seems to indicate that the pagan love of blood and soil is the only way out of the mess caused by multiculturalism.
But perhaps the film isn’t at war with itself thematically, after all. There is a third reading that synthesizes the first two: that unless today’s versions of Kelson get serious—and honest—about confronting social disintegration epitomized by the Asian rape gangs, future Jimmys and Spikes will rise, and they will impose much uglier solutions.
