Jim (Cillian Murphy), a bike courier hit by a car, wakes from his coma to find his hospital room barred shut and the hospital deserted. He discovers that during the 28 days he’s been unconscious, society has collapsed due to an outbreak of a virus that causes homicidal rage in everyone it infects. And it’s infected very nearly everyone…

Even now, almost 25 years after its release, this is a movie that asks a lot of its audience. Made at the cusp of the digital movie revolution, the film was shot very fast and loose in a style that’s meant to evoke found footage and CCTV and enabled the crew to move very quickly. The early scenes of Jim wandering through deserted downtown London are a big reason why, hauntingly effective and shot in the early hours of the morning on a very tight budget. The upside to that is the immediacy it allows the movie. The downside is that it looks like sludge, every frame grainy and either under or over saturated with colour. The movie flirts with elements of the Dogme 95 cinematic manifesto and at its worst follows the rules it shouldn’t and breaks the rules it should. The soundtrack is clunky, overly loud and intrusive. The third act is an action movie catastrophe where a bike courier becomes capable of dismantling a handful of professional soldiers and is peppered with cliched dialogue and a profoundly unpleasant rape camp subplot that robs the female characters of their agency. The naturalistic performances take a long time to gel too, especially Murphy’s laid back Jim and Naomie Harris’ intense Selina.

And yet, for a lot of the moments that have aged badly there’s a moment that shines. The city-sized fire Manchester has become. Jim realising a contrail in the sky means the world hasn’t ended. Jim saying ‘Thanks, dad’ in his sleep when another character comforts him. Little jewels of humanity shining all the brighter because of the darkness surrounding them.

Those choices are hard to get past, doubly so now than they were at the time. But if you can, you’ll see why this is such an iconic movie, and why it still haunts modern horror cinema. 7/10

Alasdair Stuart

 

Highlights: Fairy lights on a tower, the contrail scene, the moment the main characters camp out in the countryside.

Lowlights: The rape camp sequence, the janky action movie choices of the final act.