28 DAYS LATER

By: Abbie Bernstein
Review Date: Friday, June 27, 2003

28 DAYS LATER is a gift for horror fans even those of us who've found a lot to enjoy lately who have hoped for awhile now that the genre could yield up something that takes itself seriously while maintaining a high quotient of scares and gore. This is post-apocalypse dread that will remind people of a variety of earlier films, mostly from the '60s and '70s when scary movies weren't expected to be self-conscious and/or stuntfests.

The film opens when a group of animal-rights activists mount a raid on a primate lab, with the intention of liberating the chimpanzees being experimented on and kept in cramped cages. A frightened researcher warns that the animals have been "infected... with rage." (The sequence can be taken either as a slap at anti-vivisectionists who do lab raids or at scientists who do lethal experiments on primates.) Unsurprisingly, no one from the opening scene reappears later on.

28 days later, Jim (Cillian Murphy), a young bicycle deliveryman, wakes up in bed in a London hospital that is mysteriously abandoned. Confused and scared, Jim wanders equally empty streets, then finds a church filled with bodies unfortunately for Jim, one of these is not dead and he discovers what "the infected" are like snarling, fury-driven, red-eyed and incredibly fast-moving things that simply want to shred everything from limb to limb. Jim is rescued and eventually becomes part of a small band (Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson, Megan Burns) traveling in the direction of a taped radio broadcast that promises military-provided safety and "an answer to infection."

The tone

and content take an unusual turn when the travelers reach their destination, going hardcore horror again for the finale. Conceptually, director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland (who previously teamed on THE BEACH) have fully thought out the implications of their universe, everything from subtly noting how different views of the world will alter behavior to the dramatically valid concept that rage is hardly the sole province of mutants. The characters are shaped in quick but telling strokes we come to like Jim and his comrades very much in a short span of time and Boyle and company have done a brilliant job of making London appear to be totally empty, a nightmare-scape of debris, corpses and futility.

The filmmakers don't skimp on the scares, either. There's a scene in a tunnel that's is an exercise is pure fear of the dark, and the movie is good at shifting expectations, with infection sometimes coming from hide-in-plain-sight sources. Gore is moderate this is to say, it's hard-R territory, but no one is going to confuse 28 DAYS LATER with DAWN OF THE DEAD in terms of splatter. The digital photography maintains an atmospheric, filmic look under the gray skies and at night, with one shot of a car passing flowering fields looking like a startling Monet painting in motion.

The cast is excellent, with Murphy an appealing focal point as an unprepossessing fellow who develops great strength without becoming unrecognizable, Harris as a self-protective sort who's not as tough as she'd like to be, Noah Huntley as a compassionate pragmatist and Burns as a very natural 14-year-old. The two A-list U.K. actors aboard, Gleeson as a loving father and Christopher Eccleston as an Army officer with some peculiar concerns, both treat the material perfectly seriously, playing their roles as fluidly and reflectively as they would in a straight contemporary drama.

The result of the realistic performances, well-modulated writing and overall non-hysterical tone gives 28 DAYS LATER added emotional and philosophical dimensions, while simultaneously making it even more terrifying. At the end of the movie, the feeling is of having gone through something of substance and duration this is a horror movie that sticks with you on all levels.

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