Matt’s new pride and joy is up and running, if partially on borrowed technology. The new projector is beaming its enormous picture onto our family room wall, and the Very Important Speakers are enshrined on their custom-purchased pedestals. Therefore it follows that we had to venture out of our charmingly appointed cave and rent a movie to watch. We ended up inaugurating the system with 28 Days Later.

It’s a very interesting film. From the little advertising and buzz I had heard about it, I thought it was a zombie movie. I was mistaken — the bogeymen of 28 Days Later are actually fully living humans infected with a virus. This has the laudable effect of making them easier to stop in their tracks (it is a notable characteristic of zombies that they take a licking and persist in ticking) and the horror-intensifying effect that the characters in defending themselves are slaughtering real living people. At the risk of giving too much away, the movie revolves around a man who spent the 28 days of the title, the 28 days from infection, unconscious in a hospital, and now emerges to discover the world along with us, and attempt to find fellow survivors and safety. All this is fairly in line with the hypothetical genre of the movie, ‘survival horror’. However, you’ll hear people tell you that Resident Evil is ‘survival horror’, and now we see the fuzziness inherent in the system.

The characters in 28 Days Later are not trained fighters, not a unit, and not, for that matter, screaming nubile teenagers. They are a cross-section of lucky normal Britons (oh, yes, the movie is set in Britain) thrown together by virtue of luck and resourcefulness. And where the normal ‘survival horror’ story, if I understand the genre correctly, focuses on the transition from the struggle to survive to triumphantly destroying the infestation, or the transition from survival to escape from the situation, this one more eloquently focuses on the transition from struggling to retain life to struggling to retain humanity. It’s a deeper theme, and one which ensures that this movie will stay with you longer than any bop-the-zombie fluff piece, however beautifully executed. I am still intrigued and moved by this movie now, though I watched it on Friday night.

As to the execution, it was excellent — a flat, stark lighting scheme increased the ‘realism’ of the movie at the expense of more staged beauty. The plot, after the initial fantasy of the Infection is accepted, flowed quite logically indeed, resisting expectations and forming a very credible narrative. The characters were not caricatured or static, and no one person had the monopoly on stupid ideas — as is, after all, the case here in the Real World. The music was lovely, very minimalistic, and varying between spare atmospheric instrumentation and ethereal renderings of traditional hymns for the moments of hope and release. The level of blood and graphic violence is indeed high, but not overdone — enough to horrify without reaching the level of camp, desensitization, or pretty pretty blood painting (not that there isn’t a place for that, but this was not it.)

9 out of 10. Bottom line: A tight, well-executed, well-acted piece about the strengths, weaknesses, and fragility of the human animal. Tense, atmospheric, and deeply satisfying.