28 Days Later

(Screenplay: Alex Garland; director: Danny Boyle; 2003)

By Sviatlana Piatakova

October 29, 2009

28 days later (2003) is not your run-of-the-mill horror flick. Nor is it sci-fi/zombie apocalypse as we know it. The movie plays genre as a dizzying balance of pseudo-realistic horror, classic drama, post-apocalyptic dystopia, a tragic romance, for good measure. Its pace and mood are breathtakingly meandering: in the midst of rushing, rasping and running for your life (with blood pumping in your veins) the movie has time to stop and reflect on the beauty of naked and mute London and the ugliness of a human being, stripped of normality and hope. Dopy tranquillity, nightmarish speed (a blur of eyes, feet and frothy mouths), total defamiliraziation and oh-so-familiar dread are mixed into a whirlwind of shuddery cinematic pleasures. You will check your door locks, you will draw the curtains. You will have the main theme (In the House a Heartbeat) and the rest of the paranoid John Murphy soundtrack pump in your temples for days later. Because this movie goes unpleasant places and reminds us of the ultimate isolation, the beast inside and other horrors writer Alex Garland and director Danny Boyle touched upon in The Beach (2000) but failed to deliver convincingly. In 28 Days Later the tandem works magic and the result is an instant horror classic.

Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up from his lucky coma to find he had missed one hell of an event – the end of the world, or Britain, to be exact. After a group of eco-terrorists break into a Cambridge lab and free the apes infected with man-made Rage virus society collapses under the unforeseen pressures of a zombie pandemic. Jim wanders around the empty echoing London, picking up cans of soda and the pieces of the horror tale he missed together – an evacuation special of The Evening Standard, ‘missing persons’ flyers, photos of lost loved ones, and later, a suicide note from his own parents. The first infected he meets is a starving and emaciated but still-on-both-two bloody-eyed reverend – a vision so terrifying it fills you with dead-end horror to the brim. From there the chase is on. Only a band of survivors, the indomitable Selena (Naomie Harris) and dorky Mark (Noah Huntley) secure Jim’s life and all-too-knowingly fill him in on the events of the last twenty eight days.

The movie goes many places, in terms of genre, pace, character development, setting and mood, places you’d never expect horror to go. 28 Days Later wrecks your nerves and messes with your head. It’s all of those things: sombrely slow and adrenaline druggy, trashy cheap and picture-perfect cool, funky fresh and predictably derivative, drawing on zombie and postapocaliptic film classics.  The intertextual halo around the film takes nothing away from its edgy freshness. This is simultaneously a comeback and an update of the zombie genre. The zombies here are strangely new on many levels, the DV cam completely disorienting (a bad download? a pirate copy? a joke?) and, there is very little literal gore for a horror movie, but plenty of the blood-clotting fear of classic 20^th century dystopian tales. No wonder Danny Boyle referred to this movie as a drama in a sci-fi horror setting. This isn’t for gore addicts exactly; it’s for anyone in love with strange and disturbing cinema.

The genius of Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography is salient in the already classic London scenes without which this wouldn’t be the masterpiece it is. The sequence from the time Jim flaps his sunshine-lit eyelashes in the hospital room to his entrance into the darkness of the holy place is pure perfection. The DV knocks you out and leaves you with sand in your eyes, and images you fail to scratch away, something out of a recurring nightmare. It’s disorienting and paradoxical: sometimes film grain, sometimes pixelated mosaic, sometimes ocean ripple, sometimes Gaussian blur. If anything Mr. Mantle is filming light here, light shining through things, light reflected onto things, light reflecting things. This is an impressionist moving painting that has both Monet’s blurred softness and Seurat’s pointillist exactness. The edge of one object becomes the beginning of another as if light were fluid. In that interim space light particles stumble into each other, twirl, swim, dance, become one. All things will melt into each other, the fluids of the infected with the fluids of the healthy, and with a little struggle, something new will be born. In 28 Days Later the boundaries to objects material as we know them are gone, and the claustrophobia this engenders is simply terrifying.

The prevailing colours in this tour de force sequence are yellow (the rising sun and its multiple reflections onto objects), green (Jim’s robe and vegetation) and brown (Jims hair, the overturned furniture, the buildings and monuments). In the shot from the hospital window onto the parking of abandoned ambulances that failed to save anyone, you see the leaves on trees moving with the wind, and the pixels making up these leaves moving within them. London Bridge, yellow in the rising sun, is reflected in the quietly simmering waters. Between the orange Houses of Parliament and the immobile London Eye the light swims pink and pretty. Big Ben is grey, Jim’s robe robustly green. The Lion is peachy soft. The double-decker is a welcome splash of red – more of that color to be unwelcomingly embraced later.

The only soundtrack to the dizzying picture that prompts you to wonder if you are losing sight altogether, are Jim’s idiotic helloes and later the droning, schizophrenic John Murphy’s score, crescendoing when the alarm on the deserted car makes you jump out of your skin – every time you watch the goddamn scene. The girl on the billboard bleach-smiles at the non-existent humanity, the Statue of Liberty has no one left to set free. Jim, as the (supposedly) last human being is ticking off the boxes: science (hospital) – useless, Westminster  (government) – useless, the Wheel (entertainment) – useless, the Lion (art) – useless. Transport (double-decker), communication (hanging down receivers), commerce (bleached billboard smiles), democracy (Statue of Liberty), mass media (The Evening Standard) and memory (Shaftsebury Memorial) are all rendered meaningless in the face of this ultimate Armageddon. But Jim has one last sanctuary to flee to, one last chance, fragile and dim, to take. And with a sack of clinking pop soda in his hand he enters the church (Danny Boyle aspired to become a priest in his youth). After that moment Mr. Mante’s dizzy, simmering light, literally and metaphorically, goes out of the movie. 

And out of the darkness the zombies arrive. These are strange in many ways. Boyle’s monsters will never compare to lifeless, apathetic and pitiable creatures of Romero’s franchise. Boyle’s ghouls are superhumanly fast, strong, agile and leapy, murderous in a wink of an eye. Their frantic, slashing movements are a cross between spastic semian recklessness and blood-drooling butchery of a hyena on an inductive diet. They don’t eat and savour the flesh, meticulous at every chew and rip, they puke, bite, run and puke some more, all in a matter of seconds. They seem to evaporate into clouds of bloody bodily liquids as fast as they appear out of nowhere, and you feel like wiping the smears away from the totally innocent screen. A mere flash, you barely get a glimpse of them, yet they fill the viewer with a terror that is to linger long after the titles have rolled.

The nausea here is stronger than in Romero classics or the gorier Day’s own sequel 28 Weeks Later. Boyle doesn’t need zombies tearing flesh off human bone to get his message across. He doesn’t poke at your guts with inordinate portions of spectacular and unnecessary gore. He works at your brain like a Chinese water torture, drop by drop unwillingly bringing you to conclusions fit to drive you insane:

Civilization is a dreamed up construct, artificial, non-existent. All order evaporates in the face of disaster. The government is a joke. Science – a spastic spaniel playing with its own tail. Religion wants to eat you. This is the end.

Romero’s movies were critical of a certain very precise sin of humanity: Dawn was anti-consumerism, Night – anti-racist, Day – anti-militarist, Land – anti-capitalist and Diary – anti-sensationalist. Boyle is simply anti-everything. No meta-narrative comes out unbitten and virus-free, that’s why it’s one of the darkest of zombie horror observations so far. Besides the totally inappropriate finale, Boyle gives humans no hope. And unlike Romero, he is unable to squeeze any humour out of the inglorious, ugly occasion. Rage just happens. No purpose, no meaning, no justification. Humans kill humans. Not for food but for kicks. The virus is just there. It doesn’t make sense. And it shouldn’t. Because the world is absurd, existence meaningless and chaos is the only order we deserve.

The movie has a very distinct anti-war ring to it (picked up later in Weeks but substituting the generic anti-military with the trite anti-American ring to it). The vision of the dead outside the car window is clearly the (subconscious) memory of the Holocaust. How was that different? Wasn’t that the textbook definition of meaningless rage? Boyle sees the military as a bunch of sex-crazed half-wits obsessed with looking serious, putting on their hero-out-of-a-myth faces and guided by a crackpot who is all-man, all-hero and all-saviour.

It’s also important to remember that the so-called zombies here aren’t zombies at all. They are people infected with a virus, whose meaningless rage was begotten from human behaviour at its extreme. And humans here are scary all right. The moment when Selena is offering Hanna a drug to sedate her in the face of a sexual onslaught is queasy with unspeakable terror. And somehow the movie almost has a feminist aftertaste. Strictly speaking, this has little to do with the zombie genre, except for the homage it pays to Romero’s Dawn and Night. This is an intelligent drama speaking the language of zombie metaphor.

What rage does to humans is no pretty site. In the beginning Jim is a big-eyed apish figure, fragile, anorexic, stooping, echoing stupid and futile helloes into the empty air, clinging to religion, family, community. He bets on the church, insists on checking with his family, he encourages Selena to take Hannah and Frank on. The light goes off, however, and the transformation begins. He is forced to murder a child. Frank is killed, the girls are threatened with sexual slavery and Jim himself nearly escapes execution. By the end of the movie you have muscles of steel, inhuman speed, vicious cunning, split-second decision-making and murderous survival instinct. Jim’s eyes are bloody, his mouth frothy, sweat rolls down his torso and drool slides down his chin – rage, of a different kind, has gotten to him as well. Cyllian Murphey is brilliant here, as well as the beautiful and heartbreaking Naomi Harris. Brendan Gleeson is a joy as always, a faint ray of light in the midst of stifling dystopian hopelessness that this movie offers. For the existence of people like Frank, whom Gleeson eloquently portrays, humanity could almost be forgiven.

The bright red and green ending is a Hollywood burp, I’m afraid. It’s nice, it’s comforting, and it offers a sense of false respite after the nauseating terror preceding it. But as you turn off the lights and close your eyes, everything will come back, the grainy images, the frothy mouths, the screeching sounds.

The world will die of a virus. But when it happens, there won’t be quietly buzzing planes in the blue-blue sky.

Running Time: 112 minutes.

Rated R.