What could be more dreaded than stumbling across the dead bodies of your own parents? Perhaps add in the notion that the whole world is burning to the ground around you and that 95% of the people you meet want to tear your throat out with their own teeth. This is certainly the position Cillian Murphy's Jim finds himself in at the beginning of Danny Boyle's gritty, morose take on post-apocalyptic London. Having failed to flee Don't-Call-Them-Zombie-ridden England in the wake of the savage Rage virus pandemic, Jim's mother and father commit mutual suicide, seeing the option as preferable to succumbing to the monstrous outbreak. Most heartbreaking of all is the fact that Jim is unconscious in the confines of a medical facility during all of this, and they die hoping that he will never wake up to the horrors around him. Nonetheless, Jim does come to and makes finding his mum and dad his top priority. At this stage we - the audience - are as oblivious to their fate as he is, and we get to share in having all the hope sucked from the environment as he walks in to find their now decaying corpses embraced on the marital bed. Boyle is at his directorial finest in snatching back all notion of optimism and security from Jim and the scene - specifically the haunting image of the cuddling bodies - is a difficult one to forget. A near-silent hymn plays out softly as the soundtrack and the horror genre is fed its first genuinely tear-jerking moment of the then new century.
26 year old novelist and film nerd from London. Currently working on his third novel and dreaming up more list-based film articles to flood WhatCulture with.
