Perhaps because cannibalism comes with the territory, the zombie movie has proved uncommonly immune to a certain strain of critical attack: the kind that instinctively finds fault with the derivative. This is a subset of splatter cinema that endures, in no small part, by feeding on its own touchstones. The sinewy, politically charged masterworks of the late George A. Romero, “Night of the Living Dead” (1968) and “Dawn of the Dead” (1978) not least among them, have nourished the brains of aspiring horror auteurs the world over. In more recent years, every remotely viable genre anomaly has been swiftly replicated. “Shaun of the Dead” (2004), with its wry manipulations of tone, anticipated a wave of gleefully irreverent zom-coms; two fiendishly clever thrillers from East Asia, “Train to Busan” (2016) and “One Cut of the Dead” (2019), spawned offshoots of their own. Meanwhile, the popularity of shows like “The Walking Dead,” which was inspired by a series of comic books, and, more recently, “The Last of Us,” from a video game, suggests the form’s ease of transmission from one medium to the next.

I was thus more intrigued than dismayed to hear that the British duo Danny Boyle and Alex Garland were reuniting—as director and screenwriter, respectively—for “28 Years Later,” renewing a collaboration that began, decades ago, with their sensational thriller “28 Days Later.” First released in the U.K. in 2002, “28 Days Later” envisioned an eerily desolate London, emptied out in the wake of a fast-spreading “rage virus” that had reduced most of the English population to flesh-chomping predators—zombies, in other words, although the film refers to them simply as “the infected.” Compared with Romero’s slow-shambling stalkers, Boyle’s rampaging hordes were unrepentant speed demons, and they pushed the genre to new peaks of breath-sapping intensity. So did the cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle’s jostling handheld camerawork and striking use of digital video, which grounded these fresh horrors in the mundanity of the here and now.

Although “28 Years Later” kicks off with a brief, unnerving prologue, set during the early days of the outbreak, none of the characters from “28 Days Later” reappear. As for the events of “28 Weeks Later”—an underappreciated 2007 sequel, directed by the Spanish filmmaker Juan Carlos Fresnadillo—they appear to have been written out of the series’ time line altogether. By the end of that film, a batch of the infected had made it to France, implying that the virus would soon overtake the European continent and the rest of the world. But early on in the new film, we are informed that the infection was, in fact, successfully contained; twenty-eight years after the initial outbreak, the U.K. alone remains under quarantine. It’s a sharp, unmistakable jab at Brexit isolationism, right down to the small minority of uninfected survivors who have been left, with cruel indifference, to fend for themselves.

Among these survivors is a twelve-year-old boy, Spike (Alfie Williams), who is growing up in a small commune that appears to be one of the few remnants of English civilization. The village sits on an island, connected to the mainland by a narrow causeway that is accessible only at low tide. The residents have learned to coexist peacefully, and to share and conserve their limited resources. (Water is scarce, but booze appears plentiful.) When supplies run low, a brave few make brief treks to the mainland to hunt and gather. The world-building here is so vivid, inventive, and atmospheric that I would gladly have watched a movie devoted entirely to the origins of this island village: the drafting of laws and regulations, the erection of wooden barricades and barbed wire, the fending-off of bloodthirsty attackers, and the gradual yet steady emergence of a viable way of life.

But Boyle and Garland, bound by the imperatives of genre, rush through the setup with a deft, workmanlike efficiency. They’re interested in this human-made oasis purely to the extent that they can venture beyond it. Spike’s father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), believes that the lad is old enough, and sufficiently skilled with a bow and arrow, to make his first trip off the island. Spike’s mother, the pointedly named Isla (Jodie Comer), thinks he’s too young, and she rails against Jamie, her anger exacerbated by a mysterious illness that has left her delirious and depleted. The plot is bifurcated to grant father and mother equal dramatic weight. The first half covers Spike’s mainland indoctrination, as Jamie trains him in survival and—as the infected rear their putrescent heads—helps him score his first kills. The film’s second half tracks Spike’s even more harrowing journey with the increasingly sickly Isla, in hopes that she may be healed by an eccentric medicine man, Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who has developed ingenious strategies for living on the mainland, in surprising harmony, among the world’s deadliest predators. (Kelson is essentially a more benevolent version of “Apocalypse Now” ’s Colonel Kurtz, unmistakably deranged but with his humanity intact, and Fiennes, his steady gaze betraying a gleam of mad, transgressive excitement, honors the comparison to the hilt.)

The infected have themselves bred and evolved over the decades, and they now come in two easily recognizable types. Some are heavy-set and easy to outrun; they crawl slowly on the ground and prefer the taste of worms to human flesh. The others are far more vicious; they shun clothing, hunt in packs, and answer to hulking male leaders known as Alphas, who are fond of decapitating their prey with their bare hands. (They are also so generously and prosthetically over-endowed, it’s a wonder that all that flopping doesn’t impede their speed on the ground.) It takes more than an arrow to the neck to bring down an Alpha, but the others can be quickly defeated, so you can’t fault Boyle and his editor, Jon Harris, for supplying gratuitous instant-replay montages of the grisliest kills, so as to savor every burst of exploding viscera. Mantle is happily back behind the camera here, and his fleet, frenzied style has undergone significant mutations of its own. Much of the film was shot using enhanced iPhone cameras, all the better to capture the many chase and combat sequences with a nimble, lightweight virtuosity. But Mantle’s hurtling images also retain a signature smeariness, in which moody washes of gray meld, evocatively, with painterly daubs of green, and a golden sunset over the northern English coast can still inspire a measure of awe. He shows us a world that, for all its terror, has not yet relinquished its natural beauty.

In recent years, Garland has become a formidable filmmaker in his own right, and in films like “Ex Machina” (2014), “Annihilation” (2018), and “Civil War” (2024) he has made frighteningly plausible dystopia a personal specialty. Boyle, for his part, has injected “28 Years Later” with all the wit and exuberance that was absent from his previous picture, the dismal musical comedy “Yesterday” (2019), which imagined a world in which the Beatles never existed—speculative horror of a different kind.

There is, though, an amusing if surely unintended link between “Yesterday” and “28 Years Later,” insofar as the latter film’s surviving characters are sealed off in a cultural vacuum of their own. Spike has a Power Rangers action figure, but, having never previously left the island, he has no knowledge of smartphones, the internet, or Botox. He also hasn’t read “Hamlet,” something that Kelson discovers in one of the film’s best throwaway jokes—one that feels all the more playfully apt coming from a Shakespearean as seasoned as Fiennes. Underscoring the “Hamlet” reference, Kelson spends considerable time interacting with human skulls, which he has collected and assembled into a towering monument to the dead with shades of Vereshchagin’s 1871 painting “The Apotheosis of War.”

Garland’s script thus betrays a fascination with culture, and with the role of art in both the rehabilitation of civilization and the memorialization of suffering. From start to finish, “28 Years Later” unleashes a cascade of allusions—an early nod to “Teletubbies” is somehow the most ominous—that give the film a quality of self-reflexivity, a clear understanding of what it is and where, in the motion-picture annals, it belongs. As Spike and Jamie walk across the causeway, Boyle boldly splices in black-and-white footage of young British soldiers marching off to battle during the Second World War, and Technicolor clips from Laurence Olivier’s “Henry V,” a film that was gratefully received, in 1944, by war-weary British audiences. (In a cumulative flourish, Boyle sets these passages to Taylor Holmes’s chilling recitation of “Boots,” Rudyard Kipling’s 1903 poem about the monotony of life as a British soldier during the Second Boer War.)

Such mock-ennobling of the English warrior spirit gives the film’s Brexit subtext an extra-caustic bite. But the anti-militaristic strain is, if anything, less pronounced here than it was in “28 Days Later,” in which a band of self-styled soldiers proved more loathsome than the infected themselves, or in “28 Weeks Later,” which took none-too-subtle aim at the U.S. occupation of Iraq. This time, Boyle and Garland have a sharper, nastier provocation in mind. They have given “28 Years Later” a final twist that, although amply foreshadowed, jerks the story in a startling, violently funny direction. In the film’s initial week of release, this coda has already been greeted with varying degrees of shock, confusion, and hilarity; for audiences in the U.K., I suspect, it has elicited a particularly queasy sense of recognition. Suffice to say that Boyle and Garland maintain their pop-cultural savvy to the end, and that none of their characters’ names—watch the prologue carefully—have been chosen idly.

The ending serves as a handy reminder that the zombie movie, more than perhaps any other strain of horror cinema, can be a potent conductor of allegory, metaphor, and polemic. It also serves, somewhat more dispiritingly, to reëstablish the parameters of a franchise. “28 Years Later” is not only the third film in a series but the first film in a new trilogy, the second installment of which—“28 Years Later: The Bone Temple,” directed by Nia DaCosta—is set to be released in January. None of this is objectionable, let alone surprising; the careful packaging, consumption, and regurgitation of story material, as noted earlier, is less a bug than a feature of the genre. But it can’t help but retroactively impart a certain roteness to the narrative, which feels trapped, with mechanical “gotcha” efficiency, between two bookends.

The film’s most resonant moments and implications lie elsewhere—chiefly, in Spike’s relationships with his parents. Throughout “28 Years Later,” Boyle and Garland take strategic aim at what some might categorize as toxic masculinity—a societal tendency to exalt young men with an aptitude for violence—and seem to lift up, in the figure of Isla, a vision of redemptive femininity. To spell out this dichotomy, though, is to give it far clunkier emphasis than the script does. The actors provide the nuances, with stirring grace: just as Taylor-Johnson tempers Jamie’s own alpha machismo with a gentle, unfeigned paternal tenderness, so the extraordinary Comer gives Isla, even at her most despairing, an astonishing toughness of body, mind, and spirit. Even near the end, dwarfed by a tower of skulls, it is Comer whose wrenching performance gestures toward the monumental. ♦