The Cross of St George: Isolation and its Discontents in Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later
By Maud McInerney
It begins with the Teletubbies, dancing and singing. The camera pulls back. A group of children are crowded around the TV set, but they aren’t watching the inane antics of the Tubbies. They are terrified. A plague is sweeping Britain, turning people into cannibals crazed with bloodlust. Within minutes, the door is broken down. Fathers murder mothers and children, blood sprays across the screen where the Teletubbies still dance and sing. One boy escapes to the church across the road where his father, the pastor, kneels in prayer. But his father has accepted the epidemic as evidence of the End of Days; he hides his son beneath a grate, pressing a crucifix into his hand, and opens his arms to the creatures that devour him. The child sees everything and is spattered with his father’s blood.
All of this happens in the first four minutes of Danny Boyle’s 2025 film 28 Years Later, the sequel to his 2002 28 Days Later (there is also a 28 Weeks Later but it was not directed by Boyle). 28 Days follows a handful of survivors as they try make their way out of London after the release of a lab-created virus transforms most of the population into flesh-eating monsters—the opening of 28 Years apparently takes place during the onset of the virus, but in Scotland, not England. 28 Years is a more complicated film than its predecessor. While 28 Days gestures towards the past with a sequence in a ruined abbey, another in a great English country house, its central concerns are of the present: survival from one moment to the next. 28 Years evokes and critiques a specifically English version of 'medievalising' history. The film’s investment in the medieval was noted by some reviewers, but few have probed the ambivalence of the film’s vision of the past.[1]
The plot of the film after the opening sequence is simple enough, structured around a double quest narrative. In the first part, 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) leaves the uninfected ‘Holy Island,’ where he has spent his life, for a trip to the mainland with his father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). It is a rite of passage: with their long bows they will hunt not deer or boar but the Infected, which they encounter in two forms: some are obese and sluglike, but there are also the terrifying Alphas, who are fast, strong, and disturbingly priapic. After plenty of gore and jump scares, Spike and Jamie make it back to the Island. The second quest forms the heart of the film. Disillusioned with his father, Spike decides to return to the mainland with his seriously ill mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), in search of the legendary Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who may be able to help her, or who may, as most people seem to think, be a dangerous lunatic. ‘Dr Kelson is… odd,’ says Spike’s elderly neighbour, Sam. On their journey, Spike and Isla rescue an infant, born to an Infected mother but not Infected herself. When they reach Kelson, the physician assists Isla to a painless death and sends Spike back to the Island, where he leaves the infant before returning to the mainland. In the final scene, Spike encounters a tribe of track-suited hooligans who will prove to be the greatest threat of all—but this won’t be revealed until the 2026 sequel, The Bone Temple (directed by Nia DaCosta).
28 Years' plot resonates with several Arthurian romances as the young hero wanders the woods encountering both allies and foes and receives instruction from the hermit-like figure of Kelson. Spike may remind us of Chretien’s Erec, who also arrives at a sanctuary full of severed heads, or of his Perceval, who also loses his mother and is required to ask significant questions. But these narrative resonances are, finally, less interesting than the medievalism of the film's visual details and allusions to a particular version of Englishness. The most obvious of these references is the Holy Island itself, Lindisfarne. Founded in the seventh century, Lindisfarne was sacked by the Vikings in 793 CE, marking the beginning of what came to be called the Viking Age. The Peterborough MS of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives the following account:
This year came dreadful fore-warnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery, dragons flying across the firmament… on the sixth day before the ides of January in the same year, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy-island, by rapine and slaughter.
It seems more than coincidental that, as Jamie and Spike race over the causeway back to the Holy Island with the terrifying Alpha pursuing them, the sky is lit up by the Northern Lights. Boyle inverts the historical event, however. His Holy Island does not fall to rapine and slaughter; it survives and is perhaps the last place of refuge in Britain, though the film questions whether this is a good thing.
The setting on Lindisfarne literalizes the film’s concern with British isolationism. The root of ‘isolation’ is a back-formation from French isoler, derived from the Latin insula, island (OED) and Lindisfarne is doubly ‘isolated’: Britain is an island off the coast of Europe, Lindisfarne an island off the coast of that island.[2] Both Boyle and Alex Garland, the screenwriter, have linked the concerns of the film to Brexit and to isolationism more generally. For Garland, the film is 'not so much about Britain choosing to isolate itself from Europe. It was more to do with the rest of the world isolating itself from Britain.' The crawl titles near the beginning of the film tell us that the virus has been wiped out in Europe but Britain, 28 years later, remains under quarantine.
On the island, life is ‘medieval’ in what initially appears to be a positive way. Members of the community are governed by a leader who seems wise and sensible; the people sustain themselves by fishing, raising sheep and hogs, and farming. The celebratory atmosphere surrounding Spike’s departure with Jamie on his hero quest recalls a medieval fair. Above these celebrations floats the flag of St George, a red cross on a white background. The image hearkens back to the Crusades, when Christian knights ‘took the cross’ in their battle against Muslims, and St George, originally a fourth-century martyr and dragon slayer, became the embodiment of the perfect Christian knight. Although George’s Cross is not uniquely associated with England, it was adopted as an English symbol by Edward III during the Hundred Years War and later folded into the Union Jack. More recently, however, the flag has been adopted again by far-right groups such as the National Front, who embrace its earliest, anti-Muslim message. It has been flown at anti-immigration rallies across England. In contrast to 28 Days Later, in which one of the main characters is a Black woman played by Naomie Harris, who co-stars in the film with Irish-born Cillian Murphy, the survivors on the Holy Island appear to be entirely white and British. - Isolation, apparently, is also exclusion.
Spike and Jamie’s departure from the Holy Island is intercut with a montage underscoring the dark side of the Englishness embraced by the settlement. Clips of British troops marching in WWII uniform are juxtaposed with black and white scenes from 28 Days Later’s hordes of Infected, with NATO destroyers patrolling off the coast, and with scenes from the Battle of Agincourt in the form of clips from Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944). These scenes, from perhaps one of the most effective propaganda films of all time, center on the role of the English longbow, the weapon that enabled English victories at Crécy and Poitiers as well as Agincourt—the weapon whose string we have just seen Spike proudly drawing to show his steady hand, before setting out on his quest. The soundtrack is dominated by Taylor Howard’s disturbing 1915 performance of Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘Boots’ (1903):
We're foot—slog—slog—slog—sloggin' over Africa
Foot—foot—foot—foot—sloggin' over Africa —
(Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin' up and down again!)
There's no discharge in the war!
The poem was inspired by the Second Boer War (1899–1902), an occasion of extensive British war crimes that included the establishment of concentration camps and the massacre of civilians and prisoners. As Jamie and Spike reach the mainland, more scenes from Olivier’s Agincourt are intercut with red thermal vision scenes of the Infected eating something or someone. The montage culminates with an image that is repeated several times throughout the film without explanation: back in the village hall, which is being prepared to celebrate Spike’s anticipated return, a child in a leather mask with blood seeping from its eyeholes confronts the camera directly. Combined with the rising hysteria in Howard’s voice on the soundtrack, the image suggests that something is very wrong with the isolationist strategy of the Holy Island and its version of English history.
The second part of Spike’s double quest suggests what this may be. On the first quest, with his father, he is expected to become a man by demonstrating his ability and willingness to kill Infected. Notably, except for his first kill, Spike fails. His hand on the bowstring is not steady, and he is dismayed upon his return when his father drunkenly narrates his failure as heroic success. This is mythmaking based in falsehood, and Spike despises it, which should, perhaps, invite the film’s audience to query other forms of mythmaking about legendary heroes. The motive of the second quest is not to kill but to heal, and this journey, unlike the first, is marked by strange moments of reflection and random acts of kindness, as in a medieval romance. The Cross of St George is in flames as Spike and Isla leave the island. Spike has set a fire to create a distraction, but the burning flag suggests that the ideals of Lindisfarne itself may soon go up in flames.
Early in their journey, in a luminously beautiful scene set in a field of blooming canola, Spike and his mother Isla encounter a curious metal figure she calls the Angel. Muddled by the tumour growing in her brain, Isla mistakes Spike for her own father:
You said it would stand like this forever, like the Pyramids or Stonehenge. So when you look at it you… you’re seeing into the future. Do you remember that day? Us two are real-life time travellers, you said. Fallen into the future… and I got… I got scared, because I thought we really had. How many hundreds of years have we fallen this time? Is it thousands or more?
Isla’s monologue suggests the possibility of a temporality deeply at odds with the jingoistic nostalgia represented by the Cross of St George. The monuments she mentions are pre-Christian, but more importantly, time is not linear. No longer can the past be used to justify the present, if all eras collapse into one. What would it mean to ‘fall into the future’ rather than retreating into a mis-imagined past, as Lindisfarne does?
The peace of the scene is inevitably disrupted by Infected, and Spike and Isla are rescued by Erik, the last survivor of a Swedish navy shipwrecked off the coast. Like Guivret in Chrétien’s Story of the Grail, Erik attempts to educate Spike about the ways of the broader world, explaining what a cell phone is, and a delivery driver, explanations that serve to further complicate the temporality of the narrative.[3] In a random act of kindness curiously at odds with his general impatience, Erik carries Isla on his back for some way. When they stop for a rest, she wanders off, drawn by screaming from a wrecked train in a culvert. Inside the train, Isla discovers an Infected woman who is, against all apparent logic, giving birth. Isla helps her and the Infected accepts her help. They lock hands as the woman bears down, expelling a perfect and uninfected child from her ravaged body. Violence immediately reasserts itself with the appearance of an Alpha, which the film suggests is the father of the child, but Isla and Spike escape with the baby and make their way to Dr Kelson’s sanctuary, ringed with towers of bleached white bones like turrets protecting a central structure, a pyramid of skulls. ‘What is that?’ asks Spike. Dr Kelson replies with something like delight: ‘I’ve been waiting almost 13 years for someone to ask that question!’ Where Perceval fails to ask the necessary question in the castle of the Fisher King, Spike not only asks but receives an answer that unlocks the essential message of the film: memento mori, which Kelson glosses as 'remember death; remember you must die.'
We all must die, infected and uninfected alike. The apparently miraculous birth of the baby girl tells us that the line between the two may not be what we think and suggests the possibility of a much better future. What if the Infected never lost their humanity? There is no telling who is whom when we are all reduced to skulls. 'Every skull is a set of thoughts,' says Kelson. 'These sockets saw and these jaws spoke and swallowed.' Kelson refuses to kill the Infected, using a tranquilizer dart instead. And he names the huge Alpha who has been pursuing Spike and Isla, and who is presumably the baby’s father. Kelson calls him Samson, a name that recasts both his rage and his power within a Biblical frame. And if the Infected can be named, how else might we discover that they are more like us than unlike? Suddenly, the first quest, the hunt, needs to be reconsidered. Even the larva-like Infected appear to have a form of language, calling to each other. And during their panicked run though dark woods, pursued by the Alpha we now recognize as Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry, a Black actor), Spike and Jamie come across the head and spinal column of a deer, wedged into a tree, high above their reach. A flashback shows Samson tearing off the head and setting it in the tree as his followers howl in what is apparent appreciation. Evidently the Infected have ritual too, ritual that recalls pre-Christian British cults such as the worship of Cernunnos, the Horned God. If they can bear human babies, communicate with each other and even with the divine, are the Infected, 28 years later, recovering from their infection? Are they human after all?
The credits of the film are intercut with brief, subliminal shots drawn from the film, many of them focused on the Infected. The last three images to flash from the darkness are Samson’s face, the Cross of St George, and Spike’s face. The Cross of St George and all the worst things it can stand for—isolationism, racism, hatred—separates Infected and Uninfected. But maybe nothing else does.
Author Bio:
Maud Burnett McInerney (she/her) is a professor of English and Chair of Comparative Literature at Haverford College. Her most recent book is Translation and Temporality in Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie (2021), and she regularly teaches courses on Arthurian literature, epic poetry, the Apocalypse, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, modern Celtic poetry and Science Fiction.
Bibliography:
POST-SCRIPT: 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (dir. Nia DaCosta, 2026) confirms this reading of Boyle’s 2025 film.
Nicholas L. Paul, 'Modern Intolerance and the Medieval Crusades,' Whose Middle Ages: Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past, ed. Andrew Albin et al (Fordham University Press, 2019), pp. 34-43.
Dominique Soguel, 'In England, patriots and nationalists wrestle over St George’s Flag,' The Christian Science Monitor, September 12, 2025. https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2025/0912/english-flag-st.-george-immigration-protest Accessed January 15, 2026.
NOTES:
[1] See, for instance, David Crow, '28 Years Later Review: Danny Boyle and Alex Garland Go Medieval,' Den of Geek, June 18, 2025, https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/28-years-later-review-danny-boyl-alex-garland/. Accessed January 12, 2026.
[2] A false etymology links Isla’s Celtic name to the same Latin root; is she too isolated, by her illness or by her tumorous brain?
[3] He also tells him what the Infected are called in Swedish: bärsärk, or berserker—bare or bear shirts—harkening back to the Vikings and the sack of Lindisfarne.
