A strange, haunting '28 Years Later'

 

  Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland return to a series they began in 2002 when they surprised audiences with 28 Days Later, a zombie movie that thrust Cillian Murphy into a post-apocalyptic dystopia. 

  That movie was followed in 2007 by 28 Weeks Later, another helping of post-apocalyptic horror with director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo in charge of a cast that included Robert Carlyle, Jeremy Renner, and Rose Byrne.

   28 Years Later begins as series fans might expect. Put another way,  the projectile vomiting of blood begins within the first eight minutes. And, yes, there are severed heads with spinal cords still attached, not to mention fast-moving zombies and the horribly infectious Rage Virus that turns people into flesh eaters.

   But Boyle doesn't wait long to let us know that the movie will be an exercise in unhinged weirdness, setting his story on Holy Island off the English coast. The mainland -- reachable by crossing a strip of land that's only available during low tide -- is populated by infectious zombies who have been kept off the island.

    Twelve-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) becomes the movie's central character after being introduced to zombie hunting by his father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who takes him to the mainland for his first kill. Spike's initiation into manhood reveals that he can be queasy about killing -- which, in this diminished world, is accomplished with bows and arrows.  

   Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle gives the forests and the sea a feeling of end-times emptiness, and Boyle makes effectively eerie use of a recording of Rudyard Kipling's poem, Boots. The movie's sound design by Johnnie Byrne and a score by an Edinburgh group called Young Fathers further suggest dread and perhaps even hopelessness.

   Jodie Comer plays a pivotal role as Spike's confused, bedridden mom. After returning from his first hunt, Spike learns that a doctor (perhaps the last one on earth) lives on  the mainland where he's noted for tending a fire in which he burns an abundant supply of corpses.

   Spike asks his mom to accompany him to the mainland in hopes that the doctor can cure the malady that seems to be killing her. En route to the doctor's camp, the two meet Erik (Edvin Ryding), a stranded Swedish soldier who joins them for a while. Mom also helps an infected woman deliver a baby who's born virus-free.

    Almost nothing feels normal in this tense, corrupted world, but the movie saves its most bizarre flourish for the moment when Ralph Fiennes appears as Dr. Kelson. Kelson coats himself with iodine to ward off the infected. 

   Looking as if he might have wandered in from the set of a Road Warrior movie or perhaps from the jungles of Apocalypse Now, Fiennes radiates an angelic benevolence  that elevates the movie and makes it clear that although  there are many ways to die, no one escapes. His motto: Memento mori, remember you must die.

    A linked prologue and epilogue provide violent punches  that remind us that we are, after all, watching a zombie movie. But Boyle and Garland approach mortality seriously, and 28 Years Later emerges as a piece of horror that speaks in a distinctive, haunting voice that one hopes will carry into two additional movies, one of them slated to be released early next year.