28 Years Later2025

Plot

Britain has been quarantined for 28 years. On Holy Island, cut off from the infected mainland except by a causeway that floods twice a day, a community has raised a generation that has never known the old world. Spike (Alfie Williams) is twelve, and his rite of passage has arrived: a first trip across the causeway with his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) to kill his first infected.

At home, his mother Isla (Jodie Comer) is wasting away from an illness nobody on the island can name. When Spike hears about Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) — a survivor living alone on the mainland among the dead — he makes the choice the whole film turns on: he takes his mother across the water to find the one man who might tell them the truth.

What Works

The island. Boyle and Garland build Holy Island so patiently — the causeway, the gates, the songs, the rules — that when the tide cuts it off, you feel the whole world’s weight shift. It is the best piece of world-building this franchise has ever done, and it makes every mainland excursion feel like leaving the last lit room on Earth.

Alfie Williams. A child actor carries this film on his back and never buckles. Spike’s face is the film’s moral instrument: every horror registers there before it registers anywhere else, and his scenes with Comer — tender, frightened, quietly furious at a father he is starting to see clearly — are the emotional core.

Ralph Fiennes. Kelson could have been a stock mad doctor. Fiennes plays him as something rarer: a gentle, iodine-orange memorialist who has spent decades honouring the dead, infected and survivor alike, in a temple built from their bones. His arrival transforms the film, and his scenes carry a gravity the franchise has never had before.

The infected have evolved. The infected are no longer just sprinters. There are bloated crawlers, organised packs — and Alphas: bigger, smarter, and led by Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), a hulking presence the film treats with the respect of a slasher icon. One wordless sequence involving a train and a newborn is the purest sustained dread of 2025.

It looks like nothing else. Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle shot much of the film on rigged iPhone 15 Pro Max cameras — the same shoot-it-like-you-found-it spirit as the original’s camcorders, upgraded. Strobe-lit nightmare cuts, a “Boots” poem montage that splices archive footage into prophecy, a score by Young Fathers that sounds like the island singing to itself: the craft swings are huge, and most of them connect.

What Doesn’t Work

The middle sags. Between the superb first crossing and the Kelson sequence, the mainland wandering loses pressure. Individual scenes are strong; the accumulation drifts, and a subplot involving a stranded Swedish soldier plays like material from a lesser, jokier film that wandered in.

The ending will split every room. The final minutes swerve in tone so hard that half the audience leaves exhilarated and half leaves baffled — by design, arguably, but a swerve that violent has to be paid for, and this film defers the payment to its sequel. It is the main reason the audience response ran so much cooler than the critical one, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest reviewing.

Some questions are simply deferred. A full strand of the island’s story — and one character’s secret — is left hanging for the next film. As a chapter, the movie stands; as a standalone evening, a few threads dangle.

Spoiler Section

Stop here if you have not seen it.

Kelson’s diagnosis is the film’s bravest choice: Isla is dying of cancer, untreatable in a world without treatment — and Kelson knows it before anyone else says it aloud. It is a shattering performance from Fiennes, and it is also where the film quietly reframes its own horror: the plague was never really about the infected. It was about learning to grieve, and Spike helps build her place in the Bone Temple. What Isla teaches him in her last days — that love is attention, and attention, sustained, becomes the film’s thesis, spoken over the ossuary — the Bone Temple — that the film insists is not a monument to horror but to love.

And then: the baby. An infected woman gives birth — to an uninfected child, delivered with Isla’s help. Hope, literal and screaming, in a world that had filed it under extinction. Spike’s decision to leave the baby at the island gate and stay on the mainland is the film growing up in real time.

By the Numbers

28 Years Later was released on June 20, 2025 by Sony Pictures through Columbia Pictures. Reported production budget: $60 million. Worldwide box office: $151.3 million, including $70.4 million in North America — the biggest gross in the franchise’s history, ahead of both earlier films.

Trivia

Boyle, Garland, and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle all returned from 28 Days Later; original star Cillian Murphy served as an executive producer and does not appear in this film.

Much of the film was shot on iPhone 15 Pro Max cameras in custom rigs — including a 20-phone array for strobe-effect shots — echoing the original’s consumer-camcorder look.

The sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, was shot back-to-back with this film and directed by Nia DaCosta; our review of it is live on the site.

A third film is written — Garland’s script is finished — and in December 2025 Sony was reported to be moving ahead with it, with Cillian Murphy in talks to return as Jim. Boyle said in May 2026 that he hoped to shoot it in 2027; he has also been blunt that money is the obstacle — ‘We just need money,’ as he put it back in June 2025. Garland, meanwhile, has an Elden Ring film on his own slate. No start date is set.

Where to Watch

Streaming (subscription): Netflix (United States). Rent or buy: Amazon Video, Apple TV Store, and Fandango At Home carry it digitally.

The Verdict

28 Years Later earns 3.5 ravens.

Critics embraced it and audiences argued about it, and both responses make sense. This is a ferocious, gorgeous, occasionally wobbling return from the filmmakers who made the original matter — Boyle and Garland together, again, at the top of their respective games. We land with the craft, the kid, and the Bone Temple.

— Harper Nevar

Rated 3.5 out of 5 ravens.