‘28 Years Later’ is Danny Boyle at his best in this humanity-centred zombie drama. It’s an apocalyptic fable and is set in a world where smart phones don’t exist yet in which smartphone technology has been used to create it. It is full of working class heroes who have to face a different sort of world order to that generated in a Ken Loach movie where there would be an unfeeling and horrific bureaucracy that impaired lives. Here the flesh-eating zombies live in parallel to the humans and the objective is to find ways of keeping the enemy at bay and the human spirit alive.

We are privy to what happens when a quarantined group of people have to survive in a community that for obvious reasons cannot welcome outsiders. Jodie Comer plays a pivotal role in this film as a mother who seems infected with disease but it’s not a zombie related virus – and this is where the film comes into its own because a more traditional film of this genre would have made this a battle between those who are infected and those who are not or at least not yet afflicted. But this film suggests that whatever challenges the human race has to face there will still be cancers and tragedies which have to operate alongside the more immediate tragedy of protecting humanity from the zombie threat.

The film also shows the evolution and mutation of the zombies, including one giant figure who is effectively an Alpha zombie in terms of his name and his temperament. The boy at the heart of this film is a 12-year-old called Spike (Alfie Williams) who encounters on his voyage various characters who may offer hope or harm – not dissimilar really to Dorothy’s adventure on the Yellow Brick Road – and this is really a rite of passage movie whereby Spike has to fend for himself with even his own biological father no longer a figure he feels able to trust.

It is also a film in which Ralph Fiennes’ Kurtz-like medical doctor instructs the young Spike in the art of ‘memento mori’, the act of remembering and grieving for those who have lost their lives. It is as a monument to them that the real humanity of ‘28 Years Later’ can be found. There are Brexit analogies in terms of a Britain that is cut off from the rest of Europe with the zombie plague one that ensures that the country is isolated from the continent.

As much as anything ‘28 Years Later’ is a study of social, economic and political collapse – and it is ironically this rather than in the depiction of zombies per se that the real horror is manifest. The ending of the film suggests a new direction for the series, with a nod towards Jimmy Savile, but what Danny Boyle has done is furnish a film that grounds its humanity and even occasionally its optimism within the milieu of a supposedly zombie- infected absence.