I’ll be honest: I never expected a horror film to so perfectly capture the last decade of British life. Yet as I left the cinema after 28 Years Later, blinking into the sunlight and half-expecting to spot a rage-infected Brexiteer howling at a petrol pump, I realised Danny Boyle and Alex Garland had done it.

It’s not subtle: Boyle and Garland take the rage virus of the original film and turn it into a diagnosis for the nation. Britain, they suggest, hasn’t just caught a bug it’s been overtaken by an epidemic of grievance and suspicion. Anger is the new normal. What began as protest has curdled into a permanent state of fury, infecting everything from politics to Sunday roasts. This is the Brexit movie: terrifying, funny, and heartbreakingly sad.

The film suggests Britain has spent the last eight years in the grip of a peculiar virus: one part nostalgia, two parts tabloid-fuelled rage, served in a dusty Union Jack mug. In this vision, we are an island alone eating ourselves alive in fits of justified anger, convinced we’re staging a comeback, when in reality, as Bill Bryson might put it, we’re the only ones who haven’t noticed the house is on fire. Meanwhile, Europe moves on: French trains run, Spanish festivals continue, and the EU gets on with its day. Britain is left haunting its own high streets, scanning the horizon for ships that aren’t coming. The film doesn’t mock our isolation it mourns it. Like a guest lingering after the party, we’re left to tidy up while everyone else has already moved on.

Boyle’s camera finds beauty in the bleakest corners: a collapsed NHS, an empty fuel station, the flickering lights of a town hall decorated with memories of empire. The film lingers on what we’ve lost, but also on how much of it is self-inflicted. Britain’s retreat is not just about loss but about withdrawal a determination to be alone. It’s the kind of solitude people mistake for strength, right up until the loneliness sets in.

The film’s opening, with Britain lurching from one self-made crisis to the next, could be mistaken for a news montage. If you’ve spent any time in the UK since 2016, you know the script: waiting for ambulances, scanning half-empty shelves, prices up, rent up, and politicians insisting everything is fine except it isn’t.

Boyle’s film leans into nostalgia with a bittersweet longing. There are flag scenes straight from a village fête circa 1953 if only everyone weren’t so exhausted. The longing to go back is everywhere, not just on screen but in real life: an endless loop of “wasn’t it better back then?” The film gently asks: back to what, exactly? Our nostalgia is for a Britain that mostly lived in memory, and even there, only briefly.

The deeper tragedy is what we’ve lost by walling ourselves off. Under EU membership, Britons had the right to live, love, and work across 27 countries. There was peace in Ireland, cleaner water, better food, rights at work. We gave all that up for the promise of something simpler a homecoming that turns out to be a myth we told ourselves to soften the blow of decline.

And so, we rage. If there’s a “virus” infecting Britain now, it isn’t about trade deals or sovereignty, but a politics that thrives on anger. Boyle’s film shows what happens when rage becomes an identity, when every problem is someone else’s fault.

By the closing credits, you’re left with sadness and wry resignation. Maybe, though, there’s another way. Britain doesn’t have to be an island adrift, lost in nostalgia. The world we remember never really existed but the one we can build with Europe, not against it, still might.

And if you think this is reading too much into a zombie movie, Boyle himself says: “Yes, of course there is an element of that…” The infection isn’t just on screen. It’s in the streets outside the cinema the anger, the nostalgia, the myth of splendid isolation. 28 Years Later is the Brexit movie no one else dared to make.