28 WEEKS LATER
4 stars
Starring: Robert Carlyle, Rose Byrne, Jeremy Renner
Directed by: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
Rated R for strong violence and gore, language and some sexuality/nudity.
“28 Weeks Later” will define terror for a decade. Its end-of-the-world vision isn’t merely shocking – a kinetic tapestry of bloodshed that leaves viewers pale and cold. It confronts us with disquieting ideas that trouble the memory.
A bigger movie in every way than its precursor, “28 Days Later,” it’s the “Apocalypse Now” of survival horror films. It turns a standard pop-culture vehicle into a revelation.
The story unfolds in near-future England, the site of a surreal war between the living and the undead. The Rage Virus that turned victims into crazed cannibals in the earlier film has burned itself out, and Britain is a deserted battlefield. London is being repopulated under the control of the U.S. military, which has established a high-tech garrison. The city isn’t Jack the Ripper’s London with cobblestones and fog; this is a sunny, 21st century city turned into a place of menacing silence and palpable loneliness.
Among the first to return is Robert Carlyle, who waited out the cycle of contagion in a remote farmhouse, and was shattered by the experience. Carlyle’s children (17-year-old Imogen Poots and 12-year-old Mackintosh Muggleton), who were overseas during Britain’s collapse, have a joyous reunion with their grinning dad, but when they ask what became of Mum, he goes nervous and shifty.
He survived by outrunning the berserkers, and he’s been running from the consequences ever since. At the edges of the story are Rose Byrne as a committed medical officer and Jeremy Renner as an expert sniper. All are unerringly fine.
The virus reasserts itself, and the film details the step-by-step disintegration of the poorly planned military mission, but it’s no mere riff on current events. “28 Weeks Later” will endure because its deeper theme, building a family and sacrificing to protect it, is eternal. Small groups form, bond, fight together and break apart throughout the film, and the characters have a dignity that makes every death painful.
The movie is about seizures, and the camera’s hand-held convulsions add a feeling of documentary war footage to the bedlam. Too much visual turmoil would induce nausea, but there are slow, sure-footed passages of tension-building between episodes of anarchy. A scene in a pitch-black subway station, with only a night-vision rifle scope disclosing the corpse-strewn chaos, would chill the night watchman at a morgue.
Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo achieves his fright effects honestly, not through jump scares. (The only deliberate joke in the film mocks people who use boo surprises to jolt others.) As pandemonium explodes and the military attacks the reinfected and bystanders alike, Fresnadillo makes us register the anguish of each spasm and blood spurt.
In one fierce scene, Carlyle batters his head against a reinforced glass window so furiously that he reportedly suffered headaches for days. And the director makes the intense violence meaningful. A grisly eye-gouging scene isn’t included for sensationalism, but to show the attacker’s unbearable guilt and shame: He can’t bear the victim’s accusing gaze.
“28 Weeks Later” isn’t sado-porn, selling violence with relish. It’s Judgment Day prophecy.
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