Danny Boyle and Alex Garland mix the gory with political allegory and a touching family drama in this riveting zombie thriller
After great early promise in 2002 with 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle's zombie franchise looked like it was going to reanimate a moribund movie cliché but it all stumbled and shuddered to an ignoble halt with the delayed and frankly awful follow-up 28 Weeks Later.
Now prefaced by much "is he/isn’t he?" speculation about whether Cillian Murphy would reprise his role from the first movie (he isn't), Boyle is back at his maverick best with this deeply creepy return to form which reignites the twitchy paranoia and dread of the original.
And glory and gory be - writer Alex Garland, and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle also return, as does Murphy but as executive producer and not having taken his Oppenheimer diet to extremes to play a member of the emaciated massive.
They have conjured up a fever dream of a film that somehow looks like a cross pollination of Mike Leigh realism, and the sickening surrealism of Straw Dogs and The Wicker Man.
We are now on Holy Island off the northeast coast of England, 28 years after the accidental release of a highly contagious virus which caused the breakdown of society and turned infected folk into slavering maniacs with The Rage.
Perfidious Albion is now in a state of not so splendid isolation and in quarantine patrolled by European vessels. Garland and Boyle do not hold back on gleeful commentary about the contemporary UK’s perilous state, cut-off politically and culturally from the continent and muddling along with a sense of misplaced exceptionalism and proud independence.
This post-apocalyptic vision of ye olde merrie future England is something Nigel Farage might like without getting the actual satire. So political allegory and gore is the order of the day; In the island’s village hall a tapestry of a young Queen Elizabeth II in her coronation year takes pride of place and Boyle uses clips from Laurence Olivier’s Henry V and wartime newsreel footage of the Blitz to underline the fortress Britain atmosphere. Later, we see the flag of St George in flames. Bow and arrows are the weapon of choice; everyone is dressed in ragamuffin chic and the island looks like it’s devolved back to medieval England. Or maybe Féile ’90.
Wrapped in that grim tableau is a touching family drama concerning 12-year-old Spike (a very impressive Alfie Williams) and his parents, Isla (Jodie Comer - great as usual), who is suffering from a mysterious illness that causes huge trauma and grief for her doting son, and Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a scavenger and survivalist given to flashes of his own type of rage.
We first meet Spike on what will be a big day for him. He is about to be taken across the tidal causeway that connects the island to the still contaminated mainland on his first sortie among the infected; a rite of passage that will test his mettle and see him take his place within the village hierarchy.
Once across the causeway, the action clicks in with an unforgiving ferocity and father and son barely make it home after a gripping moonlit dash back across the causeway as the tide goes out.
As we have seen from the first two movies in the series, these zombies are not the shambling husks of B-movie yore but fleet of foot savages who pose a genuine threat. However, Garland and Boyle also introduce two new breeds of zombie - "Slow-Lows", obese, sluggish creatures who forage about on the forest floor and have a nasty talent for creeping up on their prey, and Alphas, muscular Berserkers who take a lot to kill.
When Spike hears about the mysterious Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), an eccentric former GP who has remained uninfected and choses to live on the mainland, he sees him as a salvation for his sick mother and so he spirits her back across to the mainland much to the anger of the island’s elders and his stricken father.
Once we are back off the island, the movie takes on a semi-mystical air with impressionistic riddles and symbols and spiritual ceremony surrounding Dr Kelson. He is clearly the Col Kurtz of the piece, a shamanic witch doctor of sorts, who tends to his very own bone orchard and has his own way of dealing with the infected marauders.
The sense of loss is everywhere. There are haunting and very moving glimpses of Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North sculpture rearing starkly from the landscape like the Statue Of Liberty in The Planet of The Apes and a very poignant shot of the now felled tree in the Sycamore Gap at Hadrian’s Wall.
A brief appearance by Edvin Ryding as a sardonic Swedish NATO soldier, who has been shipwrecked off the coast, adds another dose of dark humour to a movie which is surprisingly funny as well as disturbing.
Scottish band Young Fathers provide a pumping but abstract soundtrack for what is a multi-layered, poetic and lyrical movie but with plenty of the comic book gore beloved of fans of the franchise. Arrows fly and slice through zombie flesh and that mad dash across the causeway is exhilarating. Full of strange images and taut action scenes, Boyle has said he wanted a sense of "suffocating intensity" to the film and he really does achieve it
The bravado closing sequence, which strangely reminded me of some groovy sixties rock `n’ roll flick starring Oliver Reed, includes a crowd-pleasing cameo and sets things up smoothly for the next instalment. If it’s as good as this acrid, kerosene-choked thrill ride, we’re in for another treat.
