Well, it didn’t take 28 years, or even weeks, but one of the year’s best horror films is already arriving on a streaming service.
28 Years Later, director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland’s return to a world ravaged by the so-called Rage virus, hits Netflix in the United States this coming weekend, on Saturday, September 20. It’s technically the third film in the series, which started with Boyle’s 28 Days Later in 2002 and was followed up in 2007 by 28 Weeks Later, from Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, although the newest movie does much to undo the events of the latter.
Indeed set nearly three decades after the onset of the virus, which turns the infected into twitchy, fast-moving killing machines, the movie finds the British Isles quarantined from the rest of the world, having returned to a somewhat stable if primitive way of life. It focuses on one family in particular, with Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the patriarch, young Alfie Williams as his son, and Jodie Comer as the latter’s mother, who’s suffering from a mysterious illness. What starts as a coming-of-age survival adventure slows in the second half into a deeply emotional meditation on accepting death as a part of life.
Preceded by an all-time great trailer, 28 Years Later arrived in theaters in June and was a box office hit, pulling in $151,244,007 worldwide. It was also a critical favourite, with an 89 percent Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. In a mixed review, praised the action-filled first half for its ‘breakneck, viscera-splattered chase scenes, gnarly slo-mo kills, punky editing and edgy angles’ but nothing ‘[t]hat drumbeat of menace fades in a less-certain second half’.
The movie, which initially went to video on demand on July 29, is the first in a new trilogy, with the second part, directed by Nia DaCosta (Candyman, The Marvels), hitting theaters on January 26, 2026. Check out the trailer for the sequel here.
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