Zombie trauma

>> Horror sequel 28 Weeks Later is a dark and exhilarating assault on the senses

by MARK SLUTSKY

Imagine getting punched in the face repeatedly for two hours; now imagine that instead of a fist smashing your grill, it’s a movie, and that you kind of like it, even if afterwards you’re all stunned and shell-shocked and slightly nauseous. That’s what to expect with 28 Weeks Later, the sequel to Danny Boyle’s 2002 zombie thriller 28 Days Later.

The original was already pretty grim, as zombie apocalypse horror survival thrillers tend to be, but the sequel, directed by Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, is another tin of beans altogether; it’s a scarily dark movie. Many very terrible things happen in 28 Weeks Later, both visceral and moral; just as bad as the punctured eyeballs and gunned-down civilians are the good people who betray their loved ones out of fear, or the innocents who spread the horror unwittingly.

If you recall, 28 Days Later wasn’t a zombie movie in the strictest terms, though in practice, it was safe to call it that. It was about a highly communicable virus called “Rage” that turned its victims into super-violent killing machines prone to running around, killing and eating everyone in sight. In the new film, time has obviously passed since the first one, and England is seemingly safe again, as the infected have all starved to death—or so everyone thinks.

England is occupied by the American military (a force headed by Idris Elba, who plays Stringer Bell on The Wire), with the few survivors being slowly moved back into London, and specifically to a highly-secured area on an island in the Thames. There we find administrator Don (Robert Carlyle), who’s in charge of the new settlement and who has a dark, zombie-filled past. Luckily for him, his kids (Mackintosh Muggleton and Imogen Poots—their real names!) were on a school trip when the original outbreak occurred, and the family, save for their mother, thought dead, is reunited in the new settlement.

Without giving away some of the movie’s better twists, let’s just say that the virus hasn’t quite gone away and things get very bad, very fast. This provides ample opportunity for Fresnadillo to stretch his directorial muscles with a series of varied set pieces, united by being totally harrowing, and by his inventive use of lighting. There’s a scene in a blacked-out parking garage lit only by flashlights, a night-vision pursuit, a great outdoor night chase through London with all the power out—all pretty exhilarating.

The fact that it’s child actors we’re watching isn’t as much of a problem as you might think, and the acting is uniformly fine all around, although everyone’s running and screaming and fighting so much that you wouldn’t really have time to notice it if it wasn’t. One scene that does stand out, for its performances and its creepiness, though, is an early sequence that has Carlyle and wife Catherine McCormack holed up in a farmhouse, hiding from the infected; with the windows boarded up and the rooms lit only by candles, it’s a sweet and very eerie evocation of domestic life under zombie siege. The movie doesn’t get close to that again, really, and it might have benefited from that human-ness if it did, because otherwise 28 Weeks Later is a frankly traumatizing, if vivid, assault on the senses.

28 Weeks Later opens this Friday, May 11

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