28 Days Later

Shot using standard definition digital video cameras, director Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later plays like a degraded, interlaced despatch from a fork in the post-millennium road that was never actually taken. What was once a forward-thinking solution to the problem of low budget, but still highly disruptive (in a civic sense), filmmaking is, viewed twenty three years later, now a blurred, amber document that struggles to hold onto visual information with the stringency we are now used to. Lines are obliterated by competing data; colours resolve into bleeding clouds of undulating compression; and light lingers on the landscape of human faces like radioactive dapple. It's beautiful precisely because it's so outmoded and atypical, an analogue visual design that is suggestive of something captured then transmitted rather than drilled on a backlot. Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle adopts perspectives that stress surveillance - that of the film's creeping, slathering infected or the viewpoint of indifferent, now unmanned CCTV cameras. In this way the film's audience is kept at a constant remove from proceedings, we are agitated observers then rather than the shoulder-bumping participants that the hand-held production would seem to anticipate. Happily, even the mannered, novelistic dialogue that screenwriter Alex Garland assigns to his stressed-out characters (still in evidence in last year's Civil War) adds to the unearthed effect. That wordiness, not to mention the street-level budgeting and several less than incredible acting performances, anchors our expectations for 28 Days Later in the realm of television. This weakness actually assists the production though. It allows Boyle's film to consistently understate the level of twisting terror in a piece that often seems like a BBC serial spiralling further and further out of control.