The Committed Men

28 Years Later, and the Quest to Make Britain Weird Again

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Of all the obsessions of Dutch pamphleteers in the early 1650s, few ranked higher than England. Soon after the Anglo-Dutch wars began, they fast settled on a favoured analogy: Britain, once a land of angelic delight, had become possessed by the devil himself. A 1652 tract, The English Devil, spoke of the ‘hellish tongues’ and ‘satanic tricks’ that enabled Lucifer to ably ‘squat upon the altar’ of England. Another fused people and place entirely, rechristening the country simply as ‘Devil Land,’ a phrase historian Clare Jackson lifts for the title of her recent study of seventeenth-century England.

Four centuries later, in 28 Years Later, England’s deep spiritual weirdness remains in full fetter. In Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s film, England is festering, quarantined by NATO, the lights of patrol ships visible to the few remaining survivors on shore. Land on Devil Land and dare to meet the undead; or worse, the primitive, recidivist people who still live there.

The idea of Britain as an unusually weird place is hardly new. For generations, we’ve succeeded in bemusing the world. In 1922, George Santayana described Britain as a ‘paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors’. De Gaulle, who understood England better than perhaps any other 20th-century foreign statesman, was under no illusions: ‘She has in all her doings very marked and very original habits and traditions.’ But it’s Susan Sontag, writing in Volcano Lover, who gives us my favourite line of all: ‘If they did not exist, nobody would ever have invented them.’

28 Years Later continues this tradition. Its sheer weirdness is difficult to convey without spoilers, but the film includes: a Teletubbies-themed massacre; a cosmic foot-chase set to the prelude to Das Rheingold; a free-birth in the family seats of an LNER train; Colonel Kurtz reimagined as an English eccentric; and and the power rangers as a cult dedicated to Britain’s most notorious paedophile.

The film revels in its strangeness. About thirty seconds pass between the only non-Brit arriving on Devil Land and turning to ask no one in particular, ‘Can this get any weirder?’ I’m sorry, Erik, but it can. And it does. With a parting ‘What the fuck, you’re all insane’, addressed to an audience that’s only 25% zombie, he is carried off by a mythical giant to meet his fate.

The film is irrepressibly British, a nation’s conversation with itself. There isn’t a single American actor in the cast, and a cursory glance at the production crew suggests no Americans there either. If you’ve never intimately known the small islands on the edge of the Atlantic, the best you can do is sit in the corner and try and keep up.

Most of the dialogue is delivered in thick Northumbrian accents. Nurofen gets a shoutout. There’s a soliloquy about the Angel of the North. When Ralph Fiennes’ character, Dr Kelson, is first mentioned, he’s not called a doctor but a GP. His surgery, we’re told, was in Whitley Bay, the same place I received my second Covid jab. That fact, combined with his accent, a particularly reassuring consultant’s RP, is a whole story in itself, legible only to British viewers.

There’s method to it. Zombies are no longer the novelty they were when 28 Days Later came out in 2002, thanks to shows like The Walking Dead and The Last of Us. As Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s character, Jamie, tells his son Spike, played by Alfie Williams, as they leave the safety of their island to get Spike his first kills: the more you do something, the more relaxed you are when you do it. A life relieved of your mind is no longer the horror it once was. A film like this needs to go further to unsettle us now,.

So Garland and Boyle invent an entirely new villain: the past. Jodie Comer’s character, Isla — mother to Spike and wife to Jamie — can’t always distinguish between past, present, and future. It’s a moving affliction, but also one that makes her very ill. Most on-the-nose is the film’s opening scene. Unlike Brendan Gleeson’s character in 28 Days Later, who sacrifices himself to save his daughter, the adults we meet here aren’t quite so on it. The shuddering, terrified children of the Teletubbies massacre are, quite literally, eaten by their parents.

Moving beyond pure horror vignettes and towards an actual film was a harder task. Boyle and Garland have both spoken about this difficulty at length. Garland’s first version of the script, built around the virus being weaponised by an international company, was rejected for being too generic. So they subtracted the rest of the world from the equation, and focused on the place where it all began. To make the past a convincing villain, you have to deal in specifics — which means you have to deal with England.

Just as British riots, with their lack of guns and water cannon, often resemble mediaeval sieges, the film is relentless in drawing on the more obscure corners of British history. Cuts from Olivier’s Henry V draw the parallel between the bowmen on the island and the bowmen of Agincourt. Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s outfit — a repurposed London Fire Brigade tunic — reads as Saxon warrior garb. The iodine-stained skin of Dr Kelson evokes the woad of an ancient Briton, staring out as the Romans arrive. There’s even a tiny Viking invasion.

The English countryside isn’t immune from this Fisherian hauntology tour. We’re escorted through a festival of the eerie: the Angel of the North doesn’t feel the same, stripped of its A1 roar. Nor does the roadside grate the characters use to hide in, without its accompanying road. At least the Sycamore Gap gets to keep its tree. It’s telling that the only jump scare in the entire film comes not from a zombie, but a garden-variety fox.

Much of this isn’t about ploughing new earth, but about unearthing the stranger corners of English culture. The bet is sharing them with a new audience. It’s not just the greats like John Wyndham, J. G. Ballard, and Angela Carter who have sought to remind us of Britain’s deep strangeness, but a contemporary vanguard including Daisy Johnson and Alan Garner. It’s impossible to spot the Happy Eater cameo and not think of Rooster Byron, the wild-eyed prophet of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, recounting how he met the giant who built Stonehenge ‘just off the A14 outside Upavon. About half a mile from the Little Chef.’

The film also joins Alex Garland’s recent work — Annihilation, his adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s sci-fi novel, as well as Warfare and Civil War — in drawing heavily from the New Weird. 28 Years Later is clearly influenced by the writer who coined the term and did most to popularise it: M. John Harrison. Like Garland, Harrison is obsessed with England, its strangeness, and its inhabitants — the ‘denizens of futures that failed to take’, as he puts it in his 2020 novel The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, in which the country’s ancient, unresolved past begins to rise from its rivers and lakes, quite literally, to reclaim the land. To describe the plot of Harrison’s earlier novel The Committed Men would be to reveal themes and moments so similar I think I’d accidentally risk spoiling the series. Without Harrison, I’m not sure a film like this would exist.

If we’re handing out author accolades, credit should also go to Robert Swindells, because, as any school-age reader of his antinuclear shit-scarer Brother in the Land will know, in the event of an apocalypse, it’s Holy Island — the island Jamie, Isla, and Spike each call home — that any survivor with their head screwed on should try to reach. The route’s already saved on my Google Maps.

Holy Island is profoundly weird even today. There’s the walk across the causeway, flanked by the wooden treehouse-like refuge shelters built to protect those caught out by the tides. There’s the town itself, which feels like the UK of thirty years ago, the only giveaway being the improbably good coffee. And there are the castle and monastery ruins, with weathered boards telling the strange tales of St Cuthbert — the saint who outwitted ravens, was warmed by otters, and whose corpse, like the undead, never decays.

In 28 Years Later, the island is home to a firmly gated community, a pick-and-mix call-back to the UK’s favourite decade of the imagined past: the 1950s. You can see in Boyle’s Holy Island whatever you want to. Centrist dad? Close your eyes and it’s a caricature of Brexit Britain: an all-white island of village halls, bland food, and a strong gender divide. True blue conservative? It’s a commune of barter and trade, populated entirely by people with Kes haircuts, who muck in during the day, and by night get slaughtered in front of a red banner, sing a few songs, and cheat on their wives — the fevered fantasies of Tony Benn made reality.

Wherever you look, the past is a dead end. If our inability to escape it damns us, where might salvation come from? You might expect the answer to be the future. I’d put it differently: it lies in the things that are timeless. The clearest clue is how central religion is to the film. Of the four main places of effective sanctuary, three are churches or monasteries, and the fourth — Dr Kelson’s ossuary, which we’ll come to in a moment — may be the most spiritual of them all. An antagonist wears an upside-down cross. A zombie’s skull is literally smashed with an altar. The final line before civilisation falls? Father, why have you forsaken me.

The film is haunted by the holy spectre of Cuthbert, seventh-century saint of Lindisfarne over a millennium before it became Ken Loach Island. In one scene, Isla wades into the North Sea up to her neck, as Cuthbert once did to spend the night praying. In another, it’s a strange fog — like the one that Cuthbert, according to legend, sent to save Durham from Nazi bombs — that spares her and Spike from death.

The timelessness that dominates here, however, is a secular kind. This is a film ultimately about the big things: life and death, and whether either, or perhaps both, can free us from our imagined pasts. On the question of life, there’s a fantastic Children of Men style twist, a few meditations on childbirth as the closest thing we have to a secular miracle, and an unanswered question as to whether a child can wipe the world’s slate clean. Something I suspect Danny Boyle and I would agree on. The citizens of /r/childfree, however (one of this week’s top posts is a warning not to go near this film at all costs) might not.

The spectre of death leads us to Fiennes’ Dr Kelson, our man from Whitley Bay, with a penchant for neolithic burial rituals and a personal mission to build a timeless monument of his own. He treats death less like a funeral and more like a marriage: make your commitments, and off down the aisle you go to a very different kind of reception. These scenes are, quite obviously, the best Boyle has ever directed.

Here, weirdness isn’t something to repress or reject. It’s a diagnostic tool, opening the world up just a crack and letting us ask: is this something to keep, or to let go?

Some things, like the frisbee Jamie and Spike find early on, are worth holding onto. Others, the Tinky-Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa, and Po’s of this world, we’re happy to discard. The skulls in Kelson’s bone tower, boiled of their white bloodless flesh, turn out to be the things to hold onto the most.

The film treats the infected anthropologically, luxuriating in their evolved differences. Some graze slowly along the ground to conserve energy, munching on worms and bootlaces alike. Some have grown seven feet tall and become intelligent. One even becomes, for a few seconds at least, fully human again, as her hands slowly press into Isla’s. No horror here. Only fascination. Maybe even wonder?

Fisher again: ‘the Thing overwhelms… but it fascinates.’

This vision of weirdness, defined not by fear but fascination, is undoubtedly not what much of the audience signed up for. They wanted a horror film. Not a fascination film. But this is what we get. And when it’s gone, we miss it. In the film’s final two minutes, the world of the weird collapses. In its place comes a different kind of British strangeness: grotesque, carnivalesque.

The weird is what makes us the island that so disgusted the Dutch pamphleteers of the seventeenth century, and still unsettles many today. Our head of state is a real life Green Man, with a foster-village in Transylvania, who can trace his lineage back to Odin. Our greatest artists and writers obsess over Cold War weapons testing sites and a very peculiar German writer called Max with a penchant for the Suffolk coastline.

In This is Spinal Tap, when the fictional British rock band talk of the hex that’s taken out three of their drummers: the first, in a bizarre gardening accident (‘the authorities said best leave it unsolved’), the second, choking on ‘someone else’s vomit,’ and the last, self-combusting at a ‘jazz blues festival’ at the Isle of Lucy, the humour doesn’t just come from the absurdity, but from how plausible it all sounds.

A film like this simply wouldn’t have been made five years ago. Coming out of it, blinking, onto the Finchley Road, culture most definitely didn’t feel that stuck. It’s a better world that demands more strangeness. And one that a country like ours, a weird unloved island of stone circles, strange lights over East Anglia, and the spirit of John ‘Stumpy’ Pepys, is well placed to play a part in. Particularly if work like this keeps getting made.

Better to embrace the weird than deny it. As the protagonist of another tale of mythical quarantine puts it: ‘The Zone wants to be respected. Otherwise it will punish.’

Devil land, still. But ours.