28 Years Later and the Specter of Death

A movie that perfectly reflects our world saturated with unmourned loss

Note: This piece contains large spoilers for the movie 28 Years Later

It’s hardly an original observation to say that our society seems to willingly forget how we quite recently lived through a generation-defining trauma. Okay, several generation-defining traumas, but in this case I mean the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the fact that the disease still exists, still infects, harms, and even kills people every day, there is little official recognition that this is an extraordinary state of affairs. At best, we’re told it’s a simple fact of life that it’s up to us to try to mitigate. At worst, there’s no acknowledgment that the pandemic ever even happened, just a cold admonition to go on with your life.

Life does go on, of course, and finding a way to move forward after a tragedy is important. But it’s not healthy to simply push it down and ignore it, as it seems society has collectively chosen to do. When you refuse to acknowledge something, you become incapable of truly processing and healing from it. Instead it festers and curdles in your mind, growing so large in your imagination that the mere thought becomes debilitating. This feeling now pervades the national consciousness, years of grief over lost loved ones, lost time, lost opportunities settling within our bones with nowhere to go. It’s a disorienting feeling that many of us feel but are unable to truly articulate, because the means to understand it are denied to us.

A similar feeling of disorientation pervades the opening scenes of 28 Years Later. Spike (Alfie Williams) is a young boy whose whole life has been spent in a UK ravaged by the Rage Virus introduced to us in 28 Days Later. Raised in a sheltered island community off the coast of Scotland, his in many ways idyllic pastoral life is also fraught with a sense of danger. The specter of the Infected, humans who succumbed to the virus and now mindlessly kill any non-infected person they encounter, hangs over everything. Regular drills in archery ensure everyone knows how to defend themselves if necessary, and Spike himself is about to embark on a regular ritual of venturing out onto the mainland with his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), so he can see that danger for himself.

In other words, Spike lives in a community that is at all times surrounded by death. Yet as we continue to watch, it becomes clear that while the community acknowledges this death, it doesn’t truly face it. Precautions may be taken to protect themselves, but they seem to be animated by a desire to conquer rather than mitigate. When Spike goes out with his father to kill some of the Infected, so he can practice and get used to the idea of ending these creatures’ lives, his father evinces no curiosity. Instead, he speaks in absolutes: the virus takes their mind, so they no longer have souls. There is no guilt or consideration that needs to be given. The fire Spike sees in the distance is probably nothing and not worth thinking about. The strange ritualistic scenes they see, whether they are tied up Infected or slaughtered beasts, are best left alone.

All this culminates when they return after a harrowing escape from a powerful Alpha Infected. The mood in the village is overjoyed, as they toast Spike and his entrance into the ranks of manhood. But it all tastes bitter on Spike’s tongue. His father hypes him up, embellishing his deeds, but Spike knows he just shot a few defenseless, largely harmless Infected while failing to make shots when they were actually chased. Everyone acts like he has conquered the dangers of the world, but Spike just feels like he barely understands them.

This is all made worse by the deteriorating condition of his mother Isla (Jodie Comer). Some sort of illness ravages her mind, frequently leaving her in a confused and delusional state. Though Jamie does his best to care for her, there doesn’t seem to be much he or anyone else can really do. So instead, they mostly avoid the topic. People assure Spike that his mother is often lucid, or express hope, but the topic always comes with a hard edge, like the uncertainty of her fate makes everyone uncomfortable. In Spike’s father Jamie, this desire not to face the truth manifests in running off for a tryst with another woman in the middle of the celebration feast for Spike, a tryst Spike spots from afar.

I think it’s important to say that none of this is portrayed as malicious. The village first came together in difficult and deadly circumstances, and this requires a way to find and keep hope. At all times it is clear that everyone only wants to encourage Spike to enjoy himself and feel powerful in the face of death, in the way that has always helped them. But being forced to confront a more fundamental death, one without a body to shoot to keep at bay, has made all these assurances feel hollow. He knows, in a way only those who must directly grapple with such a loss know, that death is not conquered so easily. His father only truly knows how to hide from it, whether that’s in celebrating his successes or finding comfort elsewhere, but Spike isn’t satisfied with that.

So when he learns that there’s an old doctor a couple days’ journey outside of town, he doesn’t hesitate. Fed up with his father and the villagers, he slips out with his mother to seek out this supposed doctor. The others have avoided him for years based on the strength of a single encounter: Jamie and some others watched from a ridge as the doctor neatly laid out dozens of corpses in a field so he could burn them one by one, calmly and cheerfully cremating their remains. To a group of people so bone-deep terrified of death they can only cope by pretending to defeat it, such comfort with the ravages of death seems insane, even dangerous. But to Spike, he seems like the only person who might give him the answers he seeks.

One perilous journey later, Spike and his mother finally find him, the kindly and soft-spoken Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes). And here we see the project the doctor has devoted his entire post-apocalyptic life to: a vast ossuary, towers of bones around a pyramid of skulls. The marketing has utilized this as a symbol of fear or danger, but when it actually arrives on screen it takes on a kind of quiet beauty. Kelson explains that he takes the bones of all the dead he finds and bring them to join the ever-growing monument to lost lives. Crucially, he makes no distinction between the Infected and survivors here. He’s not naive; he knows the Infected are dangerous, and takes appropriate precautions when dealing with them. But he recognizes too that they are people who once lived, and in death still deserve respect and peace. It’s all part of the concept he explains to Spike, that of “memento mori,” poetically translated from Latin as “remember you must die.”

It is only in an environment like this, encouraged by a man who embraces death as the inevitable outcome of life, that Spike can face the truth he has so long avoided. A careful examination leads Dr. Kelson to the conclusion that Isla is suffering from terminal brain cancer, so advanced that she likely has very little time left. Heartbreakingly, a lucid Isla feels as though she always really knew what was happening to her, but she couldn’t express it unless someone else gave a name to it first. Here the movie all but outright states its central theme: that among those who cannot and will not confront the inevitability of death, it is impossible to find true comfort. It was only by going on this journey, by facing that reality not as a show of bravado but in a deeper, realer sense, that Spike could ever come to terms with his mother’s death.

And then, in the film’s most moving scene, Kelson and Isla show Spike that, if death is truly accepted, it doesn’t have to be feared. Isla knows that she will not get better, and accepts Kelson’s unspoken offer of a peaceful euthanization with his stockpile of morphine. Spike is heartbroken, the loss of his beloved mother almost too great to bear after he went to such lengths to save her. But as Kelson brings him his mother’s skull to add to his monument, he whispers the corollary to his earlier Latin proclamation: Memento Amoris, remember you must love. Climbing to the top of the pyramid, Spike places his mother’s skull at the summit, turning it to face the rising sun. Though his grief will never truly leave him, here he can say his goodbyes and know that his mother left this world the way she chose.

I don’t think it’s accurate to say that 28 Years Later is a movie about the pandemic. The ideas here are clearly broader than this narrow set of circumstances, encompassing deeply human notions of life and death that resonate through time. But it is a movie perfect for this moment. In a world that seems intent on living in fear of one of the deadliest events in recent history, in hiding behind bravado or willful ignorance, it offers a powerful rejoinder: there is no true peace to be found down that path. Only by acknowledging the trauma we all lived through and finding a way to live with it can we actually move forward.