28 Years Later.

 

23 years ago Danny Boyle directed Alex Garland’s ground breaking script, 28 Days Later.   The  film was also ground breaking in its early use of digital cameras, and Cillian Murphy’s first lead role.    It also starred Naomie Harris (later Miss Moneypenny) Brendan Gleeson and Christopher Eccleston.  It was shot by Anthony Dod Mantle using the new lightweight Canon XL1 digital cameras to great effect.   Although often still called a Zombie movie, it was not about the ‘living dead’ but about folk infected with a Lab created virus called Rage that turned them into highly energetic, murderous and seemingly mindless people - and ones who could move very fast in pursuit.   One drop of their blood would infect anyone who came into contact with it in less than a minute.    Despite being  a horror movie, and a very popular and influential one, its deeper theme (as with many other ‘horror movies’) was that of family.    And the true monsters turned out not to be the ravening infected but the uninfected.     

 

A couple of years later the studio made a sequel, 28 Weeks Later, which did not involve Boyle of Garland.  It did not impress. 

 

28 Days Later, however, has maintained a loyal fan club, and when Boyle and Garland got the rights back some years ago they started thinking about a sequel of their own.     

So now we have 28 Years Later.   In this sequel Europe is free of infection, but the British Isles have been put into an enforced International Quarantine to contain the plague, with the uninfected  left to look after themselves.     One such group live on Holy Island, Lindisfarne, linked to the Northumbrian mainland by a tidal causeway, and thereby protected enough to survive.   The collapse of technology has virtually plunged them back 200 years.   With no electricity or communications they only have bows and arrows to protect themselves with when venturing across the causeway to forage, and to ‘blood’ their teenage boys, a rite of passage completed by killing some of the infected, reverting to some common tribal practices around the world and throughout history. 

 

This movie follows 12 year old Spike, played brilliantly by Alfie Williams (who some years ago had a small part in the BBC’s His Dark Materials).  His mother Isla, played by Jodie Comer, is seriously ill.   His father, Jamie, (Aaron Taylor- Johnson) takes Spike onto the mainland to ritually kill a Crawler, one of the kind of Rage victims that have regressed into being slow ground-hugging creatures living off insects, worms and grubs and posing no real threat to the Rage free.  But a kill is a kill, and killing is a rite of passage for these young males.   While on the mainland  Jamie tells Spike about the ‘Mad Doctor’ who still lives there.  As there are no Doctors on the island Spike resolves to take his mother to the Doctor, hoping he will cure her.   The Doc is played by Ralph Fiennes.   

 

The 3^rd Act includes a scene that knocked me sideways.   I say ‘sideways’ because grief is not something we leave behind us in the past.  It travels alongside us,  and that is why sometimes we can be knocked sideways into its presence.   When I left the cinema I thought that, brilliant as the movie is, I would never want to see it again.  A few days later, however, having got over my initial distress,  I decided it really deserves a second viewing.    The fact that it so moved me is surely testament to its quality.   The terrific script, superb direction and  profound performances held me tight, despite my not being a ‘horror movie’ fan.  And yes, this is a proper bloody, gruesome horror,  but like 28 Days Later, it is much more than a horror movie and again essentially about family – and so much more. I jut so happened that part of the ‘so much more’ impacted heavily on my own long held feelings of grief. 

 

As was said in another fine film, Rabbit Hole, (2010, Nicole Kidman, Miles Teller and Aaron Eckhart, written by David Lindsay-Abaire and directed by John Cameron Mitchell),    

 ‘Grief  can be like a boulder that falls on you.  After a while you manage to crawl out from beneath it.  Then you learn to carry it, and you do not want to put it down.  It is what you have.’  

 

So I do hope you will watch this film, and do so in a cinema, but be warned, it might impact you too.   Roger Ebert, the late revered film critic, famously said that movies can be 'empathy machines'.  They can help us understand how other people might feel.   But they can also put us back in touch with our own deepest feelings.   There is no harm in that as long as they are not traumatic.   And these films do not ‘make us feel’ something, they remind us that we do already feel that something.   

 

The only thing that distracted me was the confused geography.  Some will, I am sure, remember when in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves Kevin Costner and Morgan Freeman arrived on the Dover Beach and walked to Sherwood Forest via Hadrian’s Wall, and its now infamous Sycamore Gap.   In this film young Spike walks from Lindesfarne to the same Gap, and then past the ruins of the Angel of the North.   As it happens I know this territory well and  I really do not think he walked that far, and he never crosses the Tyne, which would have been necessary.   Danny Boyle says he showed the sycamore still standing to make the point that this is an ‘alternative’ future,  but the whole film is set in an alternative timeline.    England is not, and has not been, plagued by infected maniacs.    It temporarily broke the spell of my suspended disbelief.     When Jodie and Aaron had mastered the regional accent so well, and the Northumbrian Island was so clearly identified, I thought this was jarring and unfortunate.  Of course, those without a knowledge of the area will not notice,   and once again, this may seem to be a just a horror movie, but.      

 

The sequel has already been filmed and will, Danny Boyle says, be more about evil.  In the first movie the infected were not evil, they were deranged.   Sadly, we still accuse those who are dangerously aggressively mentally ill as being evil, even monsters.  We do so of course to separate ourselves from them.    They are ‘Other’.   Many people believe however that we are all capable of acts of terrible evil – and amazing goodness – in the right or wrong circumstances, without us being ill.  Just by being human. 

      

Going with the Flow

In Positive Psychology the term Flow is ‘a cognitive state where one is completely immersed in an activity — from painting and writing to prayer and surfboarding.  It involves intense focus, creative engagement, and the loss of awareness of time and self.’

 

Flow is also a 2024 animated movie, winner of the 2025 Oscar for Best Animated Feature film, produced in Latvia by Gints Zilbalodis.   In it we follow a Cat, first of all fleeing from a flooding river, then riding in a small abandoned boat down that river to the sea.   There is already a capybara in that boat, and then a Secretary Bird,  Labrador and Lemur join them.    We are given no explanation as to why there are no human beings to be seen, though they have clearly existed there recently;  nor how animals from South America, mainland Africa and Madagascar are together in this lush landscape; or where the film is set.  The river takes them to an ancient city with architecture  that looked similar to some in  Northern India, close by what might be volcanic plug hills, tall and narrow,   They also encounter a huge Leviathan, a whale like creature.    

 

So many puzzles, so few answers, and yet, just like the Cat, we go with the flow, completely immersed in the story.    I say story, but there is not much plot.   Things just happen.   Events flow in ways that seem entirely natural, but not didactic.   

 

The animals are hardly anthropomorphised.  They do not behave like humans.  I was however frequently reminded how we humans often behave like other animals.  Flow also reminded me that we often describe human beings who act in ways that are vicious, cruel or savage as being ‘like animals’, whereas some of us acknowledge that humans can be the truly vicious, cruel and savage species.    The creatures in Flow are not noble or heroic, but they do slowly learn that they are safer together than apart.        

 

There is, I think, only one way in which they demonstrate a skill that did not fit well with their natural capacities and limitations, but that did not distract me.  

  

The visual style of the animation rarely reminded me of any other film, though sometimes Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell anime came to mind, and at one point the Leviathan in Flow leaping out of the water echoed Ang Lee’s whale in The Life of Pi.      What is certainly true is that I joyfully went ‘with the flow’.   

 

The beautiful images, created by the producer/director Zilbalodis using the open-source software Blender, the music, which he co-composed, along with the tiny but cumulative details as these creatures slowly adapt to their situation and company, were more than enough beguile and carry me forward.    Cat’s journey is both interior and exterior, learning more and more about what it is to simply be.   

 

Three films I have really enjoyed seen in the last year or so  seemed to me to be unique.   Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, Jacques’s Emilia Perez and Zilbalodis’ Flow.   Each of these reminded me that most films are best made for the cinema, not for streaming, because the immersive cinema, or Movie House, is the place where they are most likely to evoke flow, a state of ‘self-forgetfulness’,  overcoming   our distractions, reaching past our defences and reminding our hearts and minds what it is to be human.    

Conclave

When I left the movie house after watching Conclave for the first time I felt a kind of elation.   I was delighted simply by having seen so well crafted a product.   Conclave deserved its host of nominations.   I enjoyed a second viewing more than the first.   I find that often happens.  Maybe familiarity helps me step back and see it more  critically, looking at how the team technically achieved their affects, and there is the added pleasure of anticipation of knowing what will happen next.  

Being a Christian Minister of the Liberal persuasion (far too liberal for many I am sure) my deepest appreciation of Conclave  came from its explicit theology.   I looked in the Robert Harris source novel to find 13 lines of Cardinal Lawrence’s homily on the essential need for doubt, and the way certainty is always exclusive, and so the mortal enemy of unity.   

 

I am of course aware of the opposition of conservatives in and beyond the Catholic Church to Conclave,  with many voices calling it ‘Liberal propaganda' .  Interesting the way the word propaganda is used by some to decry attitudes they do not agree with.   And ironic, as it originally referred to propagating the Church's own teachings abroad, via the College of Propaganda set up in the 17th by Pope Gregory XV.   So conservatives of any denomination calling this book/film 'liberal‘propaganda’ may not know their own history.    

 

‘Harris says that he was inspired to write a novel about papal politics while watching coverage of the 2013 papal conclave. At that time, he was working on his Cicero Trilogy, a series of novels set during the Roman Republic, and the papal electors reminded him of the Roman Senate. He consulted Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor as part of his research for the book. He later gave Murphy-O'Connor a copy of the novel, and to his surprise, Murphy-O'Connor sent a letter praising its accuracy.’   Wiki. 

I have seen Ralph Fiennes in three movies this year, starting with Conclave, then reuniting with Juliette Binoche 28 years after The English Patient in The Return, and coinicdentaly in 28 Years Later, playing respectively a Roman Catholic Cardinal, Odysseus and a post-apocalyptic Doctor. He has also filmed the second volume of 28 Years Later, to be released in January 2026.   At the moment (early July 2025) he is on stage in Bath in a David Hare play, Grace Pervades, and directing All’s Well That Ends Well which will run in the same theatre in August.    What a busy man!

  

Fancy some Tzatziki and Moussaka - or something even more classic?

 2,600 years ago, we are told by Professor Edith Hall in her introduction to Euripides’ play The Trojan Women, the brutal tyrant of Pherae in northern Greece left a performance of the play because he did not want people to see him weep.    I know how he felt.  

 

The Trojan Women is an amazingly feminist and pacificist play, and one that has often been performed during 20^th century wars.   It is a reminder that in so many wars most of the casualties are women and children.  A dear friend of mine, Ann Neville, directed it at Questors during the 2^nd Iraq war and asked me to curate the sound track, which I gladly did. The play has often been set in the location of a current conflict, as was Ann's.   

 

I recently got hold of the 1971 film of The Trojan Women directed by the Cypriot Michael Cacoyannis, who set it  amidst the ruins of ancient Troy.  He made Zorba the Greek in 1964, and two other Euripides plays, Electra in 1962 and Iphigenia 1977.   The Trojan Women were Hecuba,  widow of the Trojan King Priam and mother of Hector played by Katherine Hepburn (3 years after The Lion in Winter) played by Katherine Hepburn (3 years after The Lion in Winter); Andromache, Hector’s widow played Vanessa Redgrave (4 years after Camelot);  and Cassandra, Hecuba’s daughter, played by Genevieve Bujold (2 years after Anne of a Thousand Days).  Irene Papas ( 7 years after Zorba The Greek) as the Greek Helen.  

 

They are all now in the hands of the Greek victors,  the Trojan women doomed to be their slaves or concubines.     Each of these actresses was magnificent, the first three giving voice to  their own character’s grief (or in Cassandra's case, madness)  - plus Irene Papas' Helen,  so calm and haughty as she blames everyone else for the war, including her Spartan husband Menelaus who had foolishly left her alone in his Palace with the handsome Paris,  Aphrodite who had promised her to Paris as a bribe to win the Golden Apple , and even his mother Hecuba for taking him back into the Trojan Royal Household after having first of all abandoned him.    She did have a point.   

 

The opening scenes of the film seem rather chaotic, but so was the situation, and Cassandra was out of her mind, but then each of the other women have their time in the spotlight.   These actresses were all in their own ways beautiful as well as brilliant actresses, which added to the pathos.  (Should their beauty do that?   Maybe not, but for me it did!)      

 

One surprise for me was the appearance of Brian Blessed, then in his mid 30's, as Talthybius, the Greek Herald who has to tell each of the women their fate, and in Andromache's case the fate of her child, the son of Hector.   Brian Blessed had not yet become BRIAN BLESSED, and gave a really sensitive performance.  

 

Last year read Ferdia Lennon’s novel Glorious Exploits in which Athenian POWs in Syracuse are persuaded  to perform this  play, and heard Natalie Haynes’s praise for it – particularly for Helen’s outrageous speech – in BBC R4’s Natalie Haynes Stand Up For the Classics series.  Her knowledge and wit are a painless way to explore the Classics,  and are all available through BBC Sounds.    

 

There are now some wonderful and accessible translations of these plays and of the Homeric classics available, and in the last 20 years some female writers  have produced novels following in Euripides’ footsteps by telling the stories of women whose voices are rarely heard in these classics.   Margaret Atwood led the pack, as so often, with her 2005 novel The Penelopiad, and some of my favourites are Circe  by the American Madeline Miller and A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes.    Christopher Nolan’s film of the Odyssey is on its way, and Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche joined forces again nearly 30 years after The English Patient recently in The Return, telling about Odysseus’s homecoming after 20 years.  

 

People have not been telling and retelling these millennial old stories for no good reason.    They are tasty and satisfying when served fresh.