Best Films of 2007 #8: 28 Weeks Later

Danny Boyle's 28 days later... was a very good film: a genre exercise that made a pastiche of conventions in zombie films, allowing that pastiche to resonate in a larger social message. But the message itself felt more like a paraphrase of something much more complex: its message about the different kinds of violence we're capable of enacting under certain circumstances buried under the weight of its own attempt to universalize the message rather than to ground it in contemporary matters. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's 28 Weeks Later, on the other hand, is a sweeping epic catalogue of the horrors that have plagued American society (strange, considering the London setting) in the past half a decade or so, a pastiche which uses our recent history as an analogue to those very same zombie movie cliches. The difference registers in the titles even: the former attempting a kind of narrative ellipses, a mere moment in an unending stream of atrocity; the latter title, shown on screen during a series of military reports, feeling more like a bureaucratic report of our current state of affairs; the former is all horror story punchline while the latter hearkens back to Congressional reports on terror which comment on what led us to where we are now. Boyle's film may be better in the long run, but Fresnadillo's is very much of this moment, and the experience of watching it is positively electrifying as a result.

It's more than a cliche to mention that horror films are the best barometer of our social fears (especially after breakthrough work on the genre by scholars such as Robin Wood and Carol Clover, and even a popular writer like Stephen King). But one can find an obvious successor to Romero's three great Dead films (the less said about Land of the Dead, the better) in Fresnadillo's epic, often using direct references to those films as a signal for the ways in which our social anxieties have evolved in the past forty years. Compare the casting of a black helicoptor pilot in this and in Dawn of the Dead, and you see in each film an angry statement about the way minorities are sent to die for our country in the military, but Fresnadillo's Hurricane Katrina tableaux of that pilot looking at a rooftop in the disaster zone with a plea for recognition of the life within adds a whole new contemporary resonance to that anger about race in America. The film says a lot with small moments like that one, brief images that speak volumes about our growing security state's failure to protect its citizens when protection really matters, and it always feels like it organically grows out of the genre itself rather than as an uncomfortable addition to it. As a riff on the cinematic past, the film is a revelation in its unbearable bleakness.