Cat Chats: 28 Years Later
AKA Did Danny Boyle and Alex Garland pull a Mother, Maiden, Crone?
Spoilers Ahead
Despite horror being dubbed a ‘boys club’ for so long, it’s actually one of the most diverse genres when it comes to gender representation. (And the best place to look for societal and cultural reflection.) With several conversations about ‘red pill’ masculinity sparked by the release of British Netflix drama Adolescence. Having a second British production following a young northern boy navigating similar discussion points feels incredibly topically relevant.
It’s immediately clear while watching this film that it’s composed in two distinct halves. Both follow Spike (our young protagonist, played very well by Alfie Williams) on a coming-of-age journey: one where he’s traumatised by his father, and another where he’s traumatised by his mother. This may sound like a joke, but the contrast between the two halves is very deliberately jarring. Alex Garland (once again) twisting a narrative into unexpected perspectives that follow masculinity. What makes this film interesting is that instead of highlighting toxic masculinity’s impact on young women, like the first instalment of 28 Days, the camera pans around to show how harmful this societal structuring is for Spike. A departure from what makes the first film SO incredibly groundbreaking, and proposing a question without an answer.
The world 28 Years is set is suggests a ‘fatherless Britain’, adrift and isolated, cut off from the world, and also each other. We find out early on that the world has carried on as normal, while the UK is left to cannibalise itself with the rage virus. It uses this position to continue an overarching theme in the franchise, about human selfishness, and the evil of man. (As a radical feminist, this had me chomping on the bit in the cinema)
In the first half of the film we follow Spike and his father Jamie (ATJ with a slightly dodgy accent) leaving their island commune for Spike to complete a ‘first kill’ rite of passage. Though instead of a prey animal, it’s an infected. Spike’s mum Isla (Jodie Comer is a delight in this film wow) is shown early on to be bed-bound with an undisclosed illness that leaves her in pain and prone to episodes of confusion. Despite the village celebrating Spike, dropping off bacon (a delicacy in the commune), and cheering him as he leaves, when Spike brings it up with Isla, she responds with immediate anger. We find out that Spike is going out at 12 instead of the customary age 14 or 15, and Isla rages, calling Jamie a “child killer,” or more pointedly, a “child-killing cunt” before succumbing to confusion again.
The family lives on a commune on Holy Island, a small bit of land attached to mainland NE England via a causeway that is only passable when the tide is low. This is Spike’s first time leaving the island, let alone seeing an infected, and the boy is stressing. They’re halfway across the causeway when Jamie turns to ask Spike if he wants to turn back. Spike replies, “I can’t… they’ll think I’m soft.” (you’ve sensed the red flags right?)
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On the mainland, outside the walls of the commune, Jamie is stern with Spike. At first, it’s in a parental protective capacity, until he’s basically saying ‘man up’ without really saying it. Jamie is a heavy presence at Spikes shoulder, raising the tension of every encounter with an infected by repeating, "Take the shot, take the shot, Spike." After successfully shooting one infected (a bottom feeder). Spike’s second kill is a lot more violent. It’s also a tonal shift in the film. The man is strung up by his feet in an old farmhouse, his head covered by a plastic bag. His stomach is carved, and his torso picked by crows. We don’t immediately know if the man is infected or just a corpse, (for tension reasons ofc) and by the time he reacts to their presence, Spike’s hesitation to shoot results in a messy, frantic death. An arrow through a skull, and a traumatised 12 year old.
From here on it’s just downhill for the father and son. Spike is not okay, which is only exacerbated when they come across a deer corpse that’s been brutalised by an ‘alpha’-led horde (literally what it sounds like). While Jamie is admiring the messiness, Spike walks on to find the deer’s head and spine placed up a tree trunk, a very clear warning. The ongoing chase is peppered with moments of Spike failing to lock in and help his dad as they try to escape. He fails again, and again, and again. When they reach the farmhouse they passed earlier, Spike and Jamie take to the attic to hide, and once again we see Spike failing and struggling to climb into the loft without assistance. In these moments we remember just how young Spike is, and the heated reaction his mother had that morning.
In the wide expanse of the mainland Spike start’s to question his place in their isolated society. He doubts his ability to be a hunter. In the first half of the film, we often cut back to scenes of women preparing the homecoming party; arranging food tables, doing domestic work, while young boys practice archery. We cut again to historical re-enactments of ground battles, arrows raining on charging cavalry armies. It looked like 1066: horses thundering uphill, archers drawing bows to the drum of hoofbeats. Young men releasing arrows on cue. Ingrained war in early society, young men dying. Man is evil type questioning. For Spike there is no real transferral of skills, he cant suddenly swerve to a different career path and thats scary.
During the night, the farmhouse literally begins to crumble around them. Jamie blames the foundations for being outdated and weak: but the house itself mirrors Spike’s growing disillusionment. Jamie’s emerging detachedness and casual proclivity to violence no longer sustainable in his place as Jamie’s role model. It’s not really the house that is collapsing, but Spikes perspective of his life and future.
They return to the island in a frenzy, still fleeing from the alpha. The tide is still high, and the path forward is dark and unclear. Jamie falls more than once in the frantic rush across the causeway, narrowly escaping the looming alpha, barely reaching the gates before the villagers inside shoot him down.
Despite their very near brush with death, as soon as they make it back into the compound Jamie slips straight into bravado. Spinning their survival into a self-serving myth, he steamrolls Spike’s real experience, fear, and failure with exaggerated heroism. Dismissing his discomfort, Jamie hands him a beer and parades him through the celebration. Not as a son, but as proof of his own glory. It becomes clear that the decision to take Spike out early wasn’t to prepare him for his role in society, it was to satisfy Jamie’s ego. Boyle has a masterful way of framing these negative examples of masculinity as something dangerous, and in this instance, Jamie’s dismissal is a breach of trust between father and son. This betrayal only deepens when Spike catches Jamie cheating on his mother. When confronted, Jamie hits him, and Spike tells him to leave the family home. Jamie’s rage overtakes him, the camera suddenly shaky and close, before he hits the wall on his way out, leaving a small crater in the plaster. Even at the end if the world, men can be bad.
With Spike’s rejection of his father, as both a parental figure and role model, we enter the second half of the film. This is where Isla becomes key to Spike’s journey at this point. Unwell and prone to episodes of disorientation, we watch the 12-year-old set up a distraction to sneak his mother out of the compound. Leading her to a doctor located about two days’ walk into the mainland. This time, when he leaves the commune, he does it willingly. This is the second half of his coming-of-age journey.
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This time, his hands do not shake as he shoots the infected chasing them. They stay overnight in a castle, and the fortress holds. Before sleeping, Isla asks Spike if Jamie is ever silly with him- if he’s ever daft, like her father was. The silence sticks. It brings back questions again about the commune’s isolation and the basic, inflexible, structure of their society.
When Isla and Spike run into trouble with a horde of infected, they get stuck in an old gas station and are saved by a Swedish soldier named Erik. Erik is crude, loud, and impatient with Isla’s episodes, constantly cursing about being stranded in England. He’s set up almost as a reflection of what Spike might have grown into if England hadn’t been so isolated- a cultural mirror between Jamie’s coldness and Erik’s casual detachment. Erik is also a foil to Spikes quiet thoughtfulness, both boys are soldiers, trained to shoot and aim, but Spike understands the morality of his station far more than Erik.
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In perhaps, what is the most extraordinary sequence in the entire franchise, Isla follows cries of pain into an abandoned train car and find a pregnant infected woman in labour. She holds hands with her as she gives birth to an uninfected child. The two hold eye-contact, sharing pain and understanding as Isla takes the newborn from her mother. (Honestly, this was the most emotional part of the film for me. As women, we hold pain inside of us, and this brief, profound moment between two women is a resurrection of the hope cultivated at the end of the first film.) After the birth, the mother quickly succumbs to her rage again, getting brutally gunned down by Erik. As Erik backs away from the mother, son, and baby, the camera shots speed up, switching rapidly between characters. He is the only other character captured in the low resolution- almost a throwback to the first film, as if the past 28 years caught up with him in that moment alone. He and Jamie are the only two uninfected to get this alternative camera work, perhaps Danny Boyle was trying to tell us something.
Erik represents the masculinity of today’s world: reckless, gun-slinging, and nonchalant. He’s someone Spike can’t look up to or even imitate, lacking the cultural reference points of the outside world. Jamie, by contrast, represented a more traditional masculinity cultivated through the commune’s survival-based social structure. At this point in the journey, Spike has no male role model, and neither Danny Boyle, nor Alex Garland gives us a solution to the bleak depiction of masculinity they’ve built.
Erik is beheaded and de-spined by the alpha, the prime infected carrying his head as he chases Isla and Spike down the train. Is it then, that we meet Dr. Kelson. Older than both Jamie and Erik, he lives alone and isolated in a bone temple of his own making. Kelson uses drugs to stop the alpha infected, giving him a name and a story. He humanises him. Taking the head from Samson’s hand, he guides Spike through his method of burning the dead; infected, and uninfected, to place them in his temple. Together, they burn Erik’s head to the bone, placing the skull in the tower. He quotes: “Memento mori”—remember death.
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As Isla’s mysterious illness is revealed to be suspected cancer, she chooses to die at the bone temple. (The genre-defying nature of the next sequence deserves its own write-up, but trust me—it’s beautiful.) With this loss, Spike experiences a second parental loss—but unlike his father’s betrayal, Isla’s death isn’t a conscious rejection. Even in decline, she offers tenderness, quiet strength, and moments of love. Kelson remains a distant observer, giving Spike space to grieve. When he returns with Isla’s skull, Spike climbs, this time with no hesitation, to the top of the tower. He places his mother at the very top.
When Spike leaves Kelson’s temple carrying the baby, he walks with purpose. No infected confront him. The final hurdles of his journey have passed. However, we don’t see him come of age so much as lose his childhood innocence. Spike spent time with three men across this film; his father, Erik and Dr Kelson. Are these the father, the son, and the holy spirit? (Groups of three aver very common ways to establish group dynamics, I only noticed as its something I look for with women (mother, maiden, crone), each reflecting a different ideal of humanity and masculinity).
Spike doesn’t return to the island. Instead, he drops the baby off at the gate, turns round, and keeps walking. The final scenes show him on a road, eventually encountering a group of “Jimmies” (that’s a whole other discussion—one at a time, xoxo). The suggestion of his continued journey outside the compound mirrors his search for identity. His only tether to the island was his mother. Without her, he must look elsewhere to find himself.
