28 YEARS LATER, not even the latest, for there is also, 28 Years Later 2, of whose title I cannot remember, opens with many hideous and pallid children crowd around television, watching Teletubbies, the baby show, in the “Scottish Highlands”.
But, these hideous beings, the pallid children, they are not the Zombies we know and love!
Such a twist.
These uglies are simply ugly humans, not the dreaded Zombie.
For children, it must be said, (especially of the Scottish, but not limited to such country) can be most ugly also.
We know they are not the Zombie, for, soon, smashing down the doors, the one, the only, the actual Zombies come through smashing through the doors and windows, proving beyond doubts that these children are humans.
For, as we know, Zombies do not have a taste for other Zombies, it is as if, they are picky.
Hmm, I wonder, why this is, I suppose, in the 28DL franchise, canonically speaking, they are virus, and virus does not make virus sick, as we know, from such sicknesses as, having a cold, or the dreaded Corona, not to mention, AIDS.
One of the hideous children, a boy, this is Jimmy, who will return at the end, escapes to a church where his father, a priest, tells him the virus is humanity being saved. The father is killed. The boy hides underneath so many Church metal floorboards under which you might lose things but see them again next week, but they are trapped, like so many toys. Ironic. This scene is dumbass, we are familiar with the crazy priest, who says, ‘yes, eat me, my zombie children, for I am a priest, and like all people with religion, interested only in apocalypse, I am mad! What am I like!’.
A dumbass scene we have scene many a time, and so reductive, but, we are to find out, that it is perhaps, like so many skateboards, a ‘fake out’, for the film is most interested in the numinous, and it is certainly scary!
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Twenty-eight years later, we are on Lindisfarne — AKA (which means “also known as”, in a manner of writing) is “Holy Island” — where a community has survived behind so many walls and tides, like the absolute monks who once lived there, until such absolute monks were medievally smashed by that behatted rapscallion who we know and love, the Viking.
On said Holy Island, there are children, neither hideous, nor Zombie. In fact, there are no Zombie on island. There is a school for these children.
There is archery, and making of arrows, because ammunition runs out, of course, when you are shooting the dreaded zombie like so many a lame horse who is to be glue.
Spike is one of the children of the island, and he is a total baby, at only twelve. His mother Isla is sick with something no one can name (no doctors here on island, more on this later) — she has nosebleeds, memory loss, and that fabled 'zombie of the mind', being confused.
Spike’s father Jamie, who we are sort of led to believe is Jimmy, the hideous child from beginning (but it is not, more on this later, it is simply a trick of the editing) is a scavenger, a hunter, a man who goes to the zombieful and dangerous mainland and returns with such scavenged items as, whatever they do not have on island.
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Jamie takes Spike to the mainland for the first time. This is classic rite of passage — the boy must learn to kill the zombies.
And on the mainland, this is where the film becomes wondrous.
This is Northumberland, or, need I say, North Umbra Land. The fields impossibly green. The wildflowers luminous and the sky and light more general is numinous, like so many basketball commentators might be said of it, should they be so rhyming.
The sky is most interesting, shot as terrifying, psychedelic, totally trippy but also, recognisable, and most beautiful.
Boyle and Dod Mantle, donning the mantle of cinematography, shooting on iPhones, have captured something the higher-budget apocalypse films miss — something of the English sky that does not have name, but its closest modern term, is, perhaps, “fear of God”.
The critics have called 28 Years Later "folk horror," but I do not think this is right.
Folk horror is a term that was never really meaningful of anything, used lazily by the fatso critics to describe films that have, lurking in the countryside, people in scary masks, like so many Saws of JIGSAW fame — pagans, rituals, communities with secrets, pigs, and the like. And also other things.
But 28 Years Later is most different. It is not that some bloke is hiding in such a scary mask.
It is that there is a presence but it is one that has been here immemory, a timeless strange, whether it be tides of the proverbial Viking (more on this previously), or a visit to the GP, more on this later.
For England, even the football fan knows this, that great horse of the stadia, knows to call it “EER-NGERLAND”, was strange before we arrived and will remain strange after we leave, if we ever do, and we must and this dying is most encoded by all the people who were here before whose ruins we still see, like Picts, and Edwardians.
There will always be people wandering about, as Blake so famously said, and the football fan sings also of this, when he sings, and did those feet, in ancient time.
I do not think I have seen England captured as its truest form, the late great Eerngerland, in such a way, since the late great Kill List, one of my most favourite of films. Truly an absolute horse of the screen.
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When Spike and Jamie return, there is a party. Spike is celebrated for his first zombie kill. But he discovers Jamie is sleeping with Rosey, the schoolteacher, for he sees her drunkenly eat said schoolteacher’s pussy.
Here is where I must be careful, because I felt most sorry for Jamie in the film and I am trying to understand if this is error.
His wife is dying of cancer, though no one knows this yet, because they, as they point out so northernly, are not a bloody doctor, are they!
She is confused, absent, in pain, and he cannot be sleeping with her, no, he cannot get the proverbial ‘rocks off’, his life is certainly hell, as I am aware that adults like to do such things after such traumatic incident such as Zombie PTSD.
And yes — he sleeps with another woman, said School Teacher. This is a failure, certainly, but a human one, and, we must always ask, I believe, that the camera does not judge. Judgement is so famously the work of God, when people say, “only God can judge me”. It is very much not the role of the author, I am afraid to say, to call these shots.
And, yet, this point, Jamie is treated as villain. While Spike, who is, a total baby, only twelve, may be reasonably hurt, yes, this too is reasonable, we must not judge, Jamie’s ending, at close of the film, is most bothersome.
Learning that his son, Spike, is to live away from Lindisfarne perhaps forever and lost to him, Jamie rushes towards the sea, screaming like so many a Zombie, and thus will be forever equated with the proverbial Zombies themselves, Full of rage, the final shot of him: essentially, this man is a zombie, and I do not think this is fair judgment, he is no Zombie, for if one’s wife was dying of cancer, you should not eat the proverbial pussy of another wife, but, of course, you are still human being.
Not Zombie, just stupid man!
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Spike takes Isla to the mainland to find Doctor Kelson, a man Jamie once saw burning corpses en masse, as they say in “le France”, because he thinks his mother to be sick, and that doctor, who of course, being twelve, Spike does not know what such Doctor is, for this is 28 years later, and must think them to be some kind of magic witch, like so many Baltimore Blairs.
On such journey to find doctor on mainland there is a strange conversation here. Isla asks Spike if Jamie is ever “silly” with him — playful, joking around. Spike says no.
I do not understand what this conversation is doing. It seems to imply that Jamie is cold, unfeeling, perhaps something worse. It feels left in from perhaps some other script. But this does not match the man we see.
An example, if you might: When threatened with knife by said son, Jamie calmly hands knife back to son, he turns other cheek, in most admirable fashion.
And then, “is your dad ever silly with you?”, “No”, this is not even what happens in the film, let alone fair judgment, let alone judgment at all.
In any case, on their journey, Spike and his mother, god rest her soul, we see things like, a ruined church tower. An abandoned train car.
We even see a lonely Viking, lost and wandering like so many a proverbial Jew, and a pregnant infected whom Isla helps give birth — to an uninfected baby, who shall be named, after death of Isla, Isla, making three Isla in such film, if we are to include Island.
Through all of this, the landscape remains the most present thing. It is not good, and not bad, but just is, and what it is, is simple: A sky full of fear and wondrous awe, all by itself, and the filmmakers, cleverly here, do not judge said sky. A most compelling feature, as I said abovely.
And I think this sky is what I was most affected by, watching the film while anxious from dinner — the sense that England was watching, as anyone who has driven around roundabout with drive through McDonalds and The Range knows that England is wont to do, as they say.
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Then Ralph Fiennes appears, dressed as Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. And this is most wonderful joke the film makes.
He has da shaved head, da iodine-stained skin, da compound of bones. The philosophical pronouncements about memento mori and the kinship between infected and uninfected.
For of course, in the apocalypse, what would your overeducated, pretentious, upper middle class GP decide to do, yes, of course, he decides to LARP as Colonel Kurtz, and make tower of bones. This is hilarious.
For though Doctor Kelson is indeed not murderous, as island people believe, in every GP there is something of a Shipman, a bone collector, these God-players, who the film renders so more kindly than the proverbial botherers of God.
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Kelson diagnoses Isla with terminal cancer. He offers euthanasia. She accepts.
What follows is where the film loses me — or where I lose the film. I am not certain which.
Kelson drugs Spike with opiate (a clever reference to such Cool Brittania films such as, but not limited to, TRAINSPOTTING) so the boy is in good mood and also docile.
Thus Isla’s death becomes a psychedelic sequence — trippy visuals, the mother walking off into transcendence, the score swelling. The sky looking right back.
It is framed as beautiful. It is framed as correct. We are meant to admire this death.
If the filmmakers know the larping of Doctor is funny — and they must — then they also believe this death is genuinely good. They hold both positions: "Look at this ridiculous man cosplaying Kurtz" AND "his method of killing this woman is beautiful and wise."
I do not think these can coexist. You cannot laugh at a man for building skull monuments and then weep at his wisdom.
But more than this — the scene is not really about Spike. It is about us, the audience, who get to feel that death can be handled correctly if you have the right aesthetics. The boy is twelve. His mother is dying. And his grief becomes that most hideous thing: Curated. .
This feels like Generation X self-insert.
It feels like: "My mother died in the NHS, but I took drugs, so it was actually a beautiful experience." It is the death of a mother framed as boutique festival, BBC Radio 6Music, personal journey.
It is, forgive me, so gay.
It is camp and pretentious and lame.
It is making a child's grief about the self. This is Freudian complex, narcissistic grief, but, because it is twelve year old boy, who the filmmakers cosplay as, it is meant to be, somehow, allowed.
And we are to wonder why such filmmakers are in such a habit of, in treatment not only of Spike’s father, but in many of their films, including but not limited to MEN, think all men magically become most toxic!
Unless they are upper middle class GP, of course.
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Spike places his mother's skull, after she is dead of opiates at the very top of Doctor Kelson's bone monument.
Above all other skulls, above all women. Mother as primary relation. The literal elevation of the mother above everything.
This is so unapologetically Freud that I cannot tell if it is deliberate or blind, an eyeless Zombie of bad story. The father has been destroyed — equated with zombies, dismissed as toxic, punished for human failure. The mother is transcendent — skull at apex, beautiful death, perfect in memory. The son inherits her bones and his grief. So misogynistic is this, to see mother as pinnacle of all possible skulls of women. This undercuts all transcendence in deeply moving scene. I was left with most uneasy sense, but not, on reflection, of filmmaker choice. For, we must ask, how, exactly are the wives of said such filmmakers meant to feel?
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Twenty-eight days later, Spike is rescued from the infected by Jimmy and his followers, the hideous pale children from beginning of film, but indeed, now, they are adult.
They are dressed, the hideous adult, as most hideous adult, Jim'll Fix It, aka, British Television Paedophile, Jimmy Savile. They worship this man Jimmy Savile, it seems who, in this canonical universe, we must understand, was never shown to be a hideous pedophile, he simply, we must assume, became a Zombie.
The hideous adults do karate, so it is kind of like, what if Bruce Lee, in famous tracksuit, was one of worst known pedos.
It is also, I think, proof that Boyle and Garland know what they are doing with the larping of the late great Lord Voldemort, Ralph Fiennes.
They understand what all English do, Scottish alike, that men dress up in funny outfits like motorcycle gang, or football hooligan in so many islands of Stone because they like to play dress-up, even when adult men, and that apocalypse survivors would cosplay, would build cults from fragments, because people like to do such things, and such would not change after the Zombies come.
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I am left unsure of how to feel about such film.
The Northumberland sequences are genuinely wondrous — eerie in the proper sense, England revealed as permanently strange. The larping GP is a great joke. The Savile cult is a great joke. Boyle and Garland have made something that sees England clearly.
But the death of the mother is where their limitations show. They could not resist making it beautiful in a way that flatters their own assumptions. The child's suffering becomes aesthetic content, the numinous something that might happen at Larmer Tree or Latitude, barely even a Glastonbury, cool Brittania indeed. For our mother is dead, but it is fine, because it was like,
actually, I just got fucked up and watched the sun rise, and you know, man, that made it all seem OK, actually, because I am not religious, but you really get the feeling of something, especially on drugs, you know?
I am afraid, this is very lame, and pathetic.
And so I can only conclude that 28 Years Later is exactly as good as its makers, perhaps the pinnacle of their possible achievement, shooting England in all its eer.
But it is also blind in ways that feel generational — the ironic distance inherent of and inherit by New Labour Artists, these ageing YBAs, every experience, death included, being something to boutiquely curate and experience, like an escape room of the soul, and, most importantly, the instance to not only judge characters, but to force all emotion, including grief, to belong only in terrible, horrific form, the very worst, the long read.
What are we to think, I wonder, sometime, when so numinous, and yet, so dumbass, a film is.
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George Dumberly-Ape is sixteen and the creator of the Taken Vs Predator franchise.
