Danny Boyle throws zombie fans a bone.

28 Years Later rounds up a little (it’s actually only been 23 years since the rage first arose) and also rounds up a lot – of infected that is, for its Scottish Highlands-set opening. It’s an early introduction to the way the film sets out to confound its audience: with its borderline incoherent patchwork storytelling. There’s a ramshackle approach to its timeline that feels like the narrative equivalent of a Magic Eye picture. It only makes sense when you take a step back and see the whole thing and even then, only if you squint a bit.

Despite its Scottish opening, 28 Years Later takes place in north east Northumberland, specifically the Holy Island town of Lindisfarne, protected from the Rage-ravaged mainland by a tidal causeway where a last colony of Geordies has made their home. With his wife Isla (Jodie Comer) increasingly incapacitated by a mysterious dementia-like illness, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) decides to take his 12-year-old son Spike (Alfie Williams) for his first expedition to the dangerous mainland. And would you believe things go a bit awry? Anyway, after some rote zombie-avoiding the pair return to their island sanctuary. But when Spike witnesses his father committing adultery, he decides to take his mother and flee the safety of the colony in the hopes of reaching a Doctor further along the coast.

28 Years Later falls into three distinct vignettes, bookended by the story of another, unrelated character that suggests that whatever awaits us in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple it’s going to be unlike anything the series has offered us thus far. Then again, 28 Years Later is no slouch in giving us something different.

The first thing you notice is that it’s not remotely scary. Not even once. Occasionally boring, sometimes baffling, often funny and – for a time at least – profoundly moving. Putting aside the bookends, because there’s really no way to talk about them without spoiling them, let’s examine the film’s three distinct acts. Act one is by far and away the worst, and the one where the no-doubt-helpful-in-securing-production-funding use of iPhones instead of more orthodox camera equipment, manifests most obviously. It has the rote plotting, characterisation and structure of a student film. Even the infected – including the new variants introduced here – lose their scare factor under Apple’s HDR lenses. There’s an unmistakable self-conscious glee to nearly every zombie who appears on film. The extras certainly are extra this time, their excitement at being in a Danny Boyle zombie movie evident in their eyes, even under all the zombie cosplay make-up. It’s an almost self-contained adventure with its own beginning, middle and end that goes through the motions of the story of every zombie movie ever which sees someone venture out of their place of safety for some “reason” only to (nearly) come a cropper.

The first act’s sole redeeming feature is that is ushers in the movie’s second go at making a new zombie movie and this one leans a little bit more absurdist, as Spike and his mother encounter a Swedish soldier, accidentally stranded on the mainland and therefore doomed to the quarantine which has cut Britain off from the rest of the world. Erik (Edvin Ryding) brings with him a much-needed injection of knowing humour as he joins the native pilgrims on their quest, all the time trying to explain the outside world to Spike, who has known nothing but the enRaged remnants of British civilization.

But its in its third act that 28 Years Later does something astonishing. Having navigated us through boring and silly, under the tender authority of Ralph Fiennes’ Dr Kelson, the film mutates into something most unexpected: an almost art-house meditation on mortality. Poetic, profound and poignant, Fiennes escorts Spike – and the audience – on a perspective shifting reinterpretation of the cycle of life and death – until, at the very last minute, like coming out of a trance, it remembers it’s meant to be a zombie horror movie and the spell is broken.

Both Comer and Taylor-Johnson are excellent throughout, with the latter really leaning into the grim-oop-North ambience and Fiennes is as magnificent as ever in a role that could easily have gone off the rails but the real revelation is Alfie Williams, who holds his own against any and all who share a scene with him, supporting the entire emotional fulcrum on his young shoulders. It’s him you’re watching when the film gets a little dull, or silly, or contrived, and it’s his commitment to the emotional truth of those moments that holds the film’s hodgepodge of styles, tones and pace together.

For a film that begins with a dark and obvious Brexit metaphor (a literally isolated Great Britain stewing in its own Rage) and continues with a cavalier attitude to Northumbrian geography – we pass Sycamore Gap not once but twice despite it being a 110 mile detour inland, a Sycamore Gap where the tree is still standing suggesting that even despite the rampaging Rage virus, we the viewers still somehow live in the worst timeline – 28 Years Later tests your patience early on with its stale zombie-movie-by-the-numbers opening but by the end – well, just before the very end – for a while at least, it becomes something…beautiful? Not something I ever thought I’d say about a tower of human skulls.