Danny Boyle’s exhilarating new film is in the spirit of the classic small-screen post-apocalypse fantasies from the 1970s and 1980s: dramas such as Threads and Survivors. A fatal virus is released when animal rights activists release chimps infected with “rage”. Twenty-eight days later, a terrified bike messenger called Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up in a London hospital, the city in ruins and apparently deserted, the infected populace rampaging around somewhere like vampiric mad dogs. It is when he teams up with some of the few uninfected people - played by Brendan Gleeson, Naomie Harris and Megan Burns - and heads for a supposedly safe army encampment that the horror begins.

Boyle’s use of locations – bleak countryside, gaunt motorways and weird deserted London streetscapes – is aided by fast, fluent shooting on digital video, which also facilitates some creative special effects (you can see more ambitious examples in the digitally ruined Warsaw in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist at the beginning of next year). The verminous “infected” are satisfyingly horrible: there’s a good scene in which Jim and companions are shin-deep in swarming rats actually running away from these viral un-dead. It flags during the encampment scenes, with some redundant gore, but this is a muscular, virile piece of film-making from Boyle.