Golden ‘Years’
Braaaaaaaains… Literally.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
Director: Nia DaCosta • Writer: Alex Garland
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Jack O’Connell, Chi Lewis-Parry, Alfie Williams, Erin Kellyman
UK / USA • 1hr 49mins
Opens Hong Kong January 15 • III
Grade: A-
Before going into any detail, just know that 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple has: An incredible combination of Duran Duran (!), Radiohead (!!) and Iron Maiden (!!!) needle drops, a surreal and gleefully unhinged interpretive dance to classic rock by Ralph Fiennes, which may be better than the one he did in Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash, a ton of dongs and zombies that finally, finally, eat some damn brains. Do you really need more? If a movie can put Bruce Dickinson and Simon LeBon in a happy marriage… fuck it, four stars.
28 Years Later was the legacy sequel we didn’t know we needed, but original writer Alex Garland’s (Civil War) gorgeously eerie, unexpectedly emotional vision of the UK three decades after it was decimated by Rage and left to its own devices was a typically timely, politically charged genre metaphor. This time around it’s still timely, but Garland’s mostly dropped the interiorism for horror romp. A great deal of credit to director Nia DaCosta for why The Bone Temple works as well as sit does. DaCosta takes Garland’s script and finds a way to make it gurgle and tear and splat the way it should, honouring the source material and elevating the first in what is likely to be a trilogy. When you think about it, no matter what comes next, she’s made one of the movies’ great sequels/middle entries. That’s hard to do, but not entirely unexpected from DaCosta, who did a good job in a similar space the Candyman sequel. Perfect, no, but she was on to something, and in many ways she’s flying blind on The Bone Temple. There might be a sequel, OG director/producer Danny Boyle has said, which left DaCosta to seed the film with a story she’s wasn’t even sure is coming. Oh and in her defence, no one was saving The Marvels.
Monument-slash-shooting gallery?
The Bone Temple picks up about 40 minutes (wild guess) after a bunch of weirdos in Jimmy Savile garb save idiot runaway teenager Spike (Alfie Williams, not given much to do) from a horde of infected. Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), the psychopath leader of the devil-worshipping cult The Jimmys, is sitting in judgement of Spike in a relic of a swimming pool and yes. Jimmy is the kid with the fanatical dad who escpaped from another horde at the beginning of 28 Years, so we can cut him some slack. But just some, because Jimmy and his Jimmys are a truly wretched bunch, brutally torturing other survivors and calling it “charity,” apparently for dinner, shits and giggles. When Spike is ordered into a fight to the death and manages to stab a bitch in the femoral artery, he winds up winning his very own blond fright wig and reluctantly joining the cult. The Jimmys count Jimmima (Emma Laird, The Brutalist), Jimmy Jones (Maura Bird), Jimmy Snake (Ghazi Al Ruffai), Jimmy Fox (Sam Locke) and most crucially Jimmy Ink (Erin Kellyman, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier), the least sadistic and Spike’s ally on the DL.
The Jimmys misadventures put them on a collision course with Before Times GP Dr Ian Kelson (Fiennes, neck in neck in a race with with Hugh Grant for most fabulously wacky late-career performances), whose temple of bones Spike visited earlier with his dying mother. Her skull remains at the top of the central tower, around which Kelson dines, sings and dances to himself (to ’80s New Romantics), and works on a connection – cure? – for the infected with the Alpha male zombie dude he’s named Samson (the seriously imposing Chi Lewis-Parry); they spend a lot of time getting wasted together. The Jimmys are convinced Kelson is Lord Jimmy’s father Old Nick, AKA Satan, and decide they need an audience with the Great Lord of the Dark. Cue Iron Maiden and get ready for a fist pump.
The less you know about The Bone Temple going in the better, because even though Garland and DaCosta have toned down the emotional underpinnings and eased up on additional world-building, DaCosta has taken what Garland started and run with it, broadening the post-Rage UK beyond Spike’s village and slolows in the forest. As usual, the infected aren’t the monsters, the human survivors are, and O’Connell revels in making Lord Jimmy the true horror. O’Connell basks in Lord Jimmy’s science denier and religious fanatic malevolence but lets in a sliver of humanity that also makes him kind of tragic. It’s the same kind of delicate balance he struck in Sinners, and this time his foil is a nearly perfect Fiennes, the embodiment of hopefulness in this infected world. Their inevitable meeting is mesmerising. We’re talking Heat levels of compellling.
This is beyond a doubt the straight-up nastiest entry in the frachise: gory, brutal and mean, but it’s also as nuanced as you’d expect a script by Garland to be, one that asks what addiction looks like during the apocalypse, if an oath as s doctor has any meaning and if there’s ever a way back to civilisation. If you were only partially enamoured by 28 Years, take comfort knowing the two parts slot together perfectly and reframe a ton from that film. For her part DaCosta keeps the blood flowing as if to remind us all that we’re our biggest danger, alternating between visceral and kinetic, and respectfully tranquil with help from her regular DOP Sean Bobbitt (Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave). But she also mines the script for some tremendous dark comedy; this is one of the funnier Rage Virus movies. Yes, there are a pile of unanswered questions and dangling plot threads in The Bone Temple – what happened to those Swedish patrols? Where did a Jimmys escapee go? Where the hell is Spike’s dad? – but the likelihood of there not being a closing chapter is low given the grabby fingers the closing minutes here inspire. Boyle’s just trolling us.