28 Years Later: The Bone Temple review: 'fully embraces its bizarro British heritage'
American filmmaker Nia DaCosta brings an outsider’s eye to Danny Boyle’s apocalyptic zombie series while preserving the things that make it special, writes Alistair Harkness
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (18) ★★★★
At a time when so many franchise films trade cultural specificity for generic global appeal, the willingness of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple to fully embrace its bizarro British heritage makes it one of the the weirdest mainstream horror movies of recent years. That’s all to the good. Taking over directing duties from Danny Boyle, British-based American filmmaker Nia DaCosta (Candyman) brings an outsider’s eye to the apocalyptic zombie saga, one that thrives on the naff aesthetics of abandoned leisure centres and the pomp and grandeur of Duran Duran and Iron Maiden, but also draws on the peculiarities of a mainstream pop-culture landscape that once gave rise to the psychedelic delights of the Teletubbies and the hiding-in-plain-sight monstrosity of Jimmy Savile.
The latter is the inspiration for this instalment’s warped villain, Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), the Scottish leader of an outlaw religious cult that’s taken to roaming the post-apocalyptic wastelands of Britain with a demented ferocity every bit as terrifying as the Rage-infected zombies. Introduced at the end of the previous film, the Jimmies – as they’re collectively known – are in thrall to their leader, a tracksuit-and-jewellery wearing sociopath in a bleach-blond wig who’s convinced himself he’s the son of Satan and that the Rage virus is some kind of punishment from God. His plan to fix it involves sacrificing survivors in violent rituals known as “charities” – a sly pop from Alex Garland (once again on scripting duties) at the way Savile used philanthropy to offset his crimes and access the British establishment.
As the film opens the Jimmies have picked up Spike (Alfie Williams), the young hero of 28 Years Later. The ensuing plot initially focuses on his reluctant induction into Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal’s makeshift family (and his subsequent attempts to escape it), but it also zeroes in once again on Ralph Fiennes’ Dr Kelson, the iodine-skinned medic whose titular bone temple is a misunderstood shrine to the victims of the virus and whose own efforts to study the disease have brought him into closer contact with Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), one of the new breed of alpha zombies whose bloodthirsty nature can be temporarily calmed with morphine darts.
As the middle part of a new trilogy, the film certainly embraces its second-act status, expanding the ideas and setting up a concluding chapter with another provocative cliffhanger. As such, the action isn’t quite as propulsive – and yet the move away from relentless zombie attacks gives it an off-kilter energy all its own, with Fiennes letting rip in way in a way that has, pleasingly, become more commonplace in his career over the last few years.
But The Bone Temple is really Jack O’Connell’s film. With his pitch-perfect Scottish accent and oddball energy, he’s playful and menacing in equal measure, like a lost child with bad wiring whose traumatic introduction to this world (seen in the previous instalment’s Highlands-set prologue) has caused a split with reality, one that’s now fuelling a dangerous attempt to rebuild it using bad intel from a hazily remembered past. Roll on part three.
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