28 Days Later (2002) was a fairly straightforward action/horror film, distinguished by a strong cast and Danny Boyle’s sweaty, workmanlike direction. Oddly for a sequel, 28 Weeks Later (2007) is in many ways a more individual and daring film, which takes as many cues from Hitchcock as from traditional zombie fare. Like its predecessor, it’s not exactly a triumph. But screenwriter Alex Garland’s willingness to get weirder and more mean-spirited in his follow-up is an unusual and admirable choice.
The movie, directed in this case by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, starts with Don (Robert Carlyle) a survivor of the rage virus in the UK. The American army has secured the now mostly uninhabited island, and Don serves as a building supervisor on the heavily quarantined Isle of Dogs. His children Tammy (Imogen Poots) and Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton) come to stay with him, and then break quarantine to return to their old house to find pictures of their mother, Alice (Catherine McCormack). To their shock, she’s in the house, and appears to have immunity to the rage virus. She’s returned to the base, where they quickly discover in the worst way possible that Alice is an asymptomatic carrier. And you can guess where the film goes from there.
Except to some degree you can’t. The virus breaks containment and soon you’ve got sprinting zombies slavering and murdering and biting all and sundry. But who survives, and even whose story you’re following, is a lot less predictable than is usually the case in these exercises.
Don starts out as the protagonist—though a very flawed one. The first scene of the movie shows that he abandoned his wife when she was trying to rescue a child from the zombies; he lies to his children about seeing her die. He’s a nervous non-hero—not a bad man, just someone whose understandable instinct for self-preservation overcame his sincere love for his wife.
His punishment seems out of proportion to his crime; when she’s resurrected, he rushes secretly to her side in the hospital, using his access cards, kisses her, and is immediately infected—and as a rage zombie, he brutally murders her. It’s one of the more ruthlessly cruel arcs I’ve seen in a zombie film. There’s no retribution, no heroic sacrifice; just a couple of people horrifically destroying each other because they care for one another. Which is a pointed metaphor for how loved ones can destroy each other in a pandemic.
Don and Alice’s final moments are the one sequence where the film almost attains greatness. It’s not sustained, but the script continues to flash a ruthless serrated Psycho-esque edge. With Don gone, we jump from protagonist to protagonist, each of whom suffers a violent and bloody end at a point in the narrative where you could reasonably expect them to be among the survivors.
Fresnadillo’s style isn’t much like Hitchcock’s otherwise—except that he’s interested in reminding you that you’re watching a film by an artsy stylist. There are odd angles throughout, but Fresnadillo really pulls out the stops in action sequences, where frame rates are sped up and he uses a lot of quick cuts and impressionistic brief images of blood and teeth and panic. It sometimes feels like you’re watching a zombie attack in a disco (which isn’t a bad idea but is not something that takes place in the movie).
The slick, auteur approach often undermined the visceral zombie terror, and the clever script doesn’t realize that in Don and Alice’s bleak story the film has stumbled onto something darker and potentially more powerful than mere cleverness. Nonetheless, you have to respect a sequel that deliberately turns its back on the style and in many ways the substance of its predecessor not out of haplessness, but because it has another vision to pursue. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead remains the greatest zombie sequel of all time, but 28 Weeks Later is worth sinking your teeth into.