A Look at 28 Years Later's Family Focus

Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and 28 Years Later are incredible pieces of storytelling I can’t stop thinking about. As it has recently been released, I want to talk about how 28 Years Later’s family dynamics are used as a commentary on the central theme of the franchise: the conflict between two sides of humanity. (Spoilers ahead)!

All Images from 28 Years Later 2025, British Film Institute

As with any example of great writing, character names tend to have meanings. The father of the family in 28 Years Later is called Jamie, meaning ‘supplanter’. Jamie has named his son Spike; he so desperately wants to raise his son in his own image, a killing machine against the infected for all the glory it affords them in their island community. The mother of the family is named Isla, meaning ‘island’. She is separated from others because her mind works differently due to her cancer. Isla is mostly left suffering in her bed alone and never leaving the island.

Jamie takes Spike to the mainland before he is old enough and encourages him to kill. When they come across a tied up infected and Spike hesitates to shoot, Jamie says he shouldn’t feel sorry for it because ‘No mind, no soul’. This is painfully revealing of how he feels towards his wife, Isla. Jamie cheats on Isla because her illness confuses her mind and a sexual relationship with her is not available anymore. He doesn’t see her as a person in the same way he doesn’t see the infected as people (and honestly, if their intimate relationship was all he ever cared about then he never really did, but that’s a point for later).

Isla is consistently a parallel of the infected in the film. She is a human who is sick. The infected are not the undead, not zombies, but feeling humans infected with a virus. Dr. Kelson explains that he treats the ‘-infected and uninfected alike, because they are alike’. Isla is not soulless due to her illness. She knows her husband is selfish and berates him for deciding to take Spike to the mainland before he is ready. Unlike his father, Isla cares about Spike and wants him to be a child in a world that won’t let him. She wants her son to be able to be silly, to be kind, and to laugh.

The differences between Jamie and Isla are the same differences between evil and good. One is bred from selfishness and the other selflessness. This human dichotomy is purposefully reflected in the infected too.

Samson, the alpha of a pack of infected, is like Jamie. He is a father that wants to infect his child and turn it into a hunter. Writer of the film, Alex Holland, says that 28 years later the infected have evolved to hunting for food in packs, and like animals, this produces an alpha. Jamie embraces this ruthless and animalistic side of humanity to get ahead in his community.

Inversely, Isla is aligned with the birth of life, not the taking of it. She risks helping an infected woman deliver a baby. She understands what it is like to be a woman alone and in pain. Isla carries the uninfected baby for the rest of the film symbolising that Isla, like the innocent baby, is a little bit of human goodness left. Isla slowly dying throughout the film represents the flailing compassion in people forced to survive for 28 years. Nevertheless, the film is making a point that it still exists. Isla’s compassion lives on in Spike. As much is apparent by him taking Isla to see the doctor when his father wouldn’t. This parallels what we learn about the babies born from the infected – they are unharmed by the virus – the good in humanity always comes back around just like the bad does.

The film showcases this repetition. The family politics which capture the struggle between selfishness and selflessness, is naturally symptomatic of how human history repeats itself. In fact, actions in this film are directly compared with the patterns of our history. There are flashes of medieval knights using bows and arrows over the survivors’ use of bows and arrows. Lindisfarne, the Holy Island where the family’s community of survivors live, is a very historic site which was famously stormed by the Vikings. The theme of conquering and dominating through violence is emphasised as a cyclical human occurrence. The poem overlaying this sequence encapsulates the anxiety of the kill-or-be-killed ‘survival’ mentality of man: ‘If your eyes are down, they will get on top of you’. ‘Boots, boots, boots-’ evokes a repetitive military motif that coincides with the transatlantic accent narrating the poem. This is reminiscent of another period of violence, the world wars of the 20^th Century. This entire sequence screams to the audience that humans inevitably repeat the cycle of war in the false name of survival: after this sequence, Jamie and Spike kill infected humans unprovoked.

Director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Holland have said the first film in the 28 Years Later trilogy is about ‘family’ and the second about ‘evil’. These themes being in this order is a significant choice, especially when the protagonist is the child of the family in this story. Spike, as the product of Jamie and Isla, is first presented with the different perspectives carried through generations of human history by his family unit: the self-interested thirst for power and glory masked as ‘survival’ represented by Spike’s father, and the selfless and brighter approach to life taught by Spike’s mother. The perspectives are clearly gendered ones; Danny Boyle has repeatedly said that ‘women understand what true horror is’ (this is portrayed more centrally in the plot of 28 Days Later) so the differences between the father and mother are very intentional. You can’t talk family politics without gender politics.

We can infer that childbirth was a horrific experience for Isla when she doesn’t hesitate to support and empathise with the pregnant infected, Isla likely gave birth alone in the bed she is always confined to. The attitude her husband has towards her is objectifying and isolating – as I mentioned before he saw her only as a body for his own needs. This is why Isla is more equipped to teach Spike kindness and levity. When you know ‘true horror’, you care about the preserving the light more.

With the gendered reading we can look at how the film chooses to highlight that Isla’s father made her feel protected and safe when she was a child (in her moments of confusion she calls Spike ‘Dad’ when he takes care of her). There is a comparison of fatherhood with Jamie here. Isla gives Spike an example of a positive and loving male role model. She tells Spike it is important to love. Jamie tells Spike it is important to kill. This is something history shows us is passed down through generations of men rather than women and links back to the cyclical male images of war in the beginning of the film (a sequence played over Spike and his father, two generations of men, going to the mainland with weapons).

After Isla dies, Spike wholly follows his mother’s perspective and this is juxtaposed by the return of Jimmy. Jimmy is the child showed in the outbreak of the rage virus flashback. We see him meet Spike in the closing scene of 28 Years Later as a grown man killing infected for fun. It is clear that Jimmy is going to lead us into the second film about ‘evil’. His family make-up was very similar to Spike’s, however, unlike Spike, he seems to have followed his father’s perspective on life. In the flashback, Jimmy’s mother rushed to keep her children away from attack at her own expense, and his father, a priest, was willing to sacrifice his own son and family to the infected in the name of God.

The only deviation we see in Jimmy’s family compared to Spike’s is that his father’s selfishness is intwined with his religious involvement. There were some symbolic implications about religion in 28 Days Later as the first scene of the infected in the franchise is set in a church. It looks like religion will now be explored in the second 28 Years Later film through Jimmy’s character specifically. My prediction is that religion as an institution, like the military in 28 Days Later, will be presented as another extension of man’s thirst for power over others. Jimmy is wearing his father’s cross as an adult, symbolising him adopting his father’s perspective. Jimmy is now leading his own group all dressed like him like he is a God with followers. Religion and cult mentality is the next natural step up into the evils of humanity from what Jamie represented as a single hunter and ‘supplanter’ – it’s time to get people to worship you.

 This is chillingly exacerbated by Jimmy and his followers being unmistakeably dressed like Jimmy Savile. Jimmy Savile had a sadistic god-complex and a devoted following that made him and his deplorable crimes untouchable. (Like I said, character’s names really do hold meaning in this franchise). The film ending on the shockingly foreboding image of the darkest figure in the UK’s recent history embodied by a cultish group – a cultish group spawned from the teachings of religion in the ‘civilised’ world – really does mark the transition from ‘family’ to ‘evil’ for the next instalment.

Jimmy and Spike are thus each other's foils. Jimmy is batting for the evil of humanity, and Spike, the goodness. Mind you, only one of these characters was born after society collapsed and grew up knowing nothing but a post-apocalyptic world. Spike’s naivety affords him a larger ability of hope and kindness. Unlike Spike, Jimmy remembers the time before 2002 and clings to it (- his clothing, the Teletubbies theme). He has had to survive on his own from a very young age because his family were killed when his entire world changed. However, now he kills beyond survival for sport. Even with these different impacting factors in mind, it remains that one boy followed his father’s selfishness and the other his mother’s selflessness. The franchise is about how good and evil are continuously reborn throughout our existence and are always in conflict with one another, even when the environment has reset itself to a survival state. However, there is always a choice, and we are often introduced to these two paths at our very beginning: in the family.