Imagine the United Kingdom: its small land mass decimated by demographic change, the native population forced into the shadows, brutalized day after day, risking both freedom and livelihood if it chooses to fight back. Is this the London of Sadiq Khan, now 40 percent foreign-born and a place where Muslim rape gangs and leftist revolutionaries call the shots—or the bucolic Scottish Highlands as imagined by director Danny Boyle, in the latest installment of his cult 28 horror franchise? Other than a handful of zombies, there’s not much daylight between these two dystopian visions.

28 Days Later (2002) showed us an end-of-the-world scenario, but even as zombies ravaged the British Isles it was man’s dark nature that proved to be the real threat. The sequel, 28 Weeks Later (2007), showed the dark side of power and authority when its holders sense they are losing control. Having secured its cult status, the third installment went into “production hell” for almost as long the titular time frame, until28 Years Later finally hit the big screen this summer.

I walked into the theater expecting a great thrill, but one that was just as lib-coded as the previous two installments. What I wasn’t expecting was the most culturally subversive film of the last decade—but that’s exactly what Boyle delivered.

28 Years Later opens with a flashback to the original outbreak, during which a daycare gets ravaged by the “infected.” One young boy, forsaken by his father, survives. We then jump forward 28 years to meet another boy, Spike (Alfie Williams, in a stellar breakout role), whose own father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), has raised him the best he could from the safety of their small island village off the coast of Scotland.

Jamie isn’t a bad father, at least he tries not to be, but his shortcomings as a man mean he can only teach Spike so much. He pushes to take the boy out on his first ranger mission to the mainland before he’s ready. It’s a coming-of-age ritual for every boy in this dystopian world, as they must learn to cull the latent zombie population before it can grow and threaten the village. But after Spike succumbs to boyhood fear and the duo barely make it home alive, it’s clear the mission was more about Jamie’s pride than it was about initiating Spike into manhood. Upon their return, Jamie regales the village with invented stories of his son’s heroic exploits, as Spike cringes beside him in shame.

Yet it’s the lie about his physically and mentally incapacitated mother (Jodie Comer) that sends Spike over the edge. Jamie says there’s nothing to be done, but when Spike learns there’s an “old world” doctor (Ralph Fiennes) still alive on the mainland, he realizes his father is just too weak and cowardly to try and save her. Fleeing a community that will only ever hold him back, he steals his mother away in the night and sets out for the doctor. It’s a real initiation into manhood this time, as he fights through a brutal, crumbling landscape and hordes of the undead, the last remnant of Britain and her people.

We talk a lot about the crisis of masculinity—the inevitable atomization of the digital age as economic and family structures trivialize men’s physical advantages and feminism continues its war on “toxic masculinity.” While these unique modern neuroses may potentiate the crisis in our own time, the film’s subversive message seems to be its framing the suppression of masculine vitality as a universal and ceaseless struggle. The state of nature is depicted as chaotic, elemental, and oozing with carnal blood lust. The village, on the other hand, is obsessed with nurturing, safety, and survival—together these elements constitute a suffocating, Paglian femininity. Yet this is the reality of world history at most times and places, not just amid zombie apocalypses. Even at the end of the world, only man, brimming with the vitality of pure will, can restore order and retake control.

Spike’s little island village cares only for basic preservation. The banquet hall and town square reflect a communal medieval squalor, and we see the naïve joviality of a people trapped in the shadows, unaware of a world outside its pathetic self. They cling to heaps of junk from the old world, but there’s no technology, no medicine, not even a radio—no attempt to reclaim anything that was lost. Yes, the village nurtures its own, but it forsakes anyone who has the temerity to leave the herd. There will be “no rescues” under any circumstances, the shriveled den mother reminds Spike and Jamie when they first set out through the gates. Individuals are subordinated to the blob of the community—but there is no real humanity, no real community worth having at all.

Jamie, enervated by the village, cares only what it thinks of him. He doesn’t care about heroism or victory; he has no will of his own, he simply wants to exist, even if it means passively accepting that the mother of his child will suffer and die. He says the doctor is mad, dangerous, a lost cause — but when mother and son finally reach him, Spike learns his secluded lair offers something far closer to “civilization” than anything he’s ever known.

The doctor is mad, by the insular, feminine standards of the village—even, or especially, by the standards of our world today. He resides in a temple built to honor death itself, with ornate domes and pillars constructed from the bones of the dead that ward off the infected. “Memento Mori”—“remember death”—he explains to Spike, a reminder of the inevitably of death that drives him forward in an unwinnable battle which nevertheless gives life meaning. To this end, he crafts sophisticated tonics and weapons through imaginative uses of the rudimentary resources at his disposal, allowing him to become a king of his own little empire. He alone controls his fate, carving out both a purpose and a sanctuary as he expands his temple amidst the chaos. Through sheer will he conquers nature and the ruin it brings. By diagnosing Isla with terminal cancer, he allows mother and son to take control of their fates as well.

A life befitting of humanity—a true civilization—arises from what you build, impose, and control. And such a life only comes with the risk and defiance of death. As he leaves his boyhood behind, Spike comes to understand this. Rather than return to the village, where living consists in hiding from death, he sets out to make his own way.

In the final scene, Spike comes across the boy from the beginning, Jimmy, now a warlord at the head of a band of happy warriors who revel in nothing more than slaughtering the undead for sport. Jimmy is comically chavvy in demeanor. He’s the type of unrefined Brit who once crushed skulls at Agincourt, fought through the trenches of the Somme, and who can be found crassly mouthing off about immigrants at the pub today. In short, he is a feminist’s worst nightmare. Yet he’s the only thing standing in the way of humanity’s complete annihilation.

It’s tempting to see this as a cheesy transition, a setup for another lucrative sequel. But to do so would be to misunderstand the entire spirit of the film.

28 Years Later is not really a zombie movie, but a jolt of invigoration to today’s Western world, which finds itself in much the same position as Spike’s village. The film is a call to action, an initiation ritual in its own sense, to manifest, as a man, the world you want to see through sheer power and will. Flee the safety of the world you know, return to your ancestral home, and throw off the savage yoke that has brought it to the brink of destruction. It may end in your demise, but a life lived without trying is no life at all.