‘28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’ Review: Nia DaCosta Charts the Middle Chapter of a UK Post-Apocalypse That Remains Appreciably Weird [B]

Anyone who saw 28 Years Later would likely pinpoint the last two minutes of the film as a source of serious excitement, bewilderment, or some strange mix of the two. Director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland’s long-delayed continuation of their watershed zombie apocalypse franchise, which started in 2002, left audiences with a sequel tease of such a jarring tonal shift that even all the iPhone-shot stutter-stop bow-and-arrow zombie kills and mixed-media footage of Laurence Olivier’s Henry V peppered through the rest of the film seemed restrained in comparison. When Jack O’Connell abruptly appears as Jimmy Crystal, with a gang of martial arts-trained acolytes in tow as they save young, defenseless Spike (Alfie Williams) from a group of infected to the tune of a thrashy rendition of the Teletubbies theme song, it suggests that Boyle and Garland have a stratagem for directing this new trilogy that is either exhilaratingly unpredictable or overwhelmed by its own overindulgence in its divergent forms of style and sub-genre-hopping.

The reality, at least for the immediate follow-up, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, is somewhere in between. Boyle steps away from the director’s chair to let Nia DaCosta helm another Garland-penned script, further expanding the grimy, eccentric details of a UK nearly three decades on in being quarantined due to the Rage Virus. What that ultimately means is that this is more Garland’s movie than DaCosta’s. Boyle, who is set to return to direct the third film in this trilogy, had stepped up to his writer’s wonky storytelling with his own visual character. DaCosta makes something more formally traditional, and more revealing of the story’s disjointed but often still invigorating developments.

Dropping the iPhones for conventional cinema cameras, The Bone Temple indeed loses the viscerality of its predecessor’s abstract imagery. Boyle’s regular cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle, is traded for DaCosta’s, Sean Bobbitt. The two mount a perfectly handsome experience that is appropriately intense, slightly surreal, and, when necessary, surprisingly tongue-in-cheek. Though having just come off of last year’s more auteur-driven Hedda, The Bone Temple feels like another for-hire franchise job in the same vein as The Marvels and Candyman, where she mainly functions to serve the established mold of a series needing to meet particular obligations.

Still, those obligations are more interesting here than in those other franchise movies. Even if it has trouble fitting all of its ideas into one neat package, The Bone Temple is appreciably weird, continuing to pick up and run with new tonal elements and character details that help to set the series apart from the film’s zombie cinema peers, even at the expense of full coherence. Garland approaches this as a two-pronged story that eventually intersects: the first follows Spike and his new reality as a reluctant member of the newfound Jimmy cult. This gaggle of young, sadistic wanderers—all dubbed Jimmy—serves the whims of the man who has christened himself Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, who may believe he’s the son of Satan. They all adorn the same shoulder-length blond hair and colored tracksuits, continuing to evoke notorious UK media personality and sexual predator Jimmy Savile, acting as one example of the film’s gesturing toward ideas that it never fully makes good on.

The other focus is on Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), still making his body reddish-orange from covering himself in iodine, tending to his titular bone temple, and forging a new relationship with the huge, startlingly savage and, yes, massively hung Alpha that he’s named Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry). Samson is still ripping people’s heads off via their eye sockets, and taking along their spinal cords for good measure, but that’s not stopping Kelson from trying to push the boundaries of his work as a doctor to see what signs of life may still lie behind Samson’s raging eyes. The Bone Temple begins experimenting with the tonal territories it can push itself into early on: as Dr. Kelson drugs Samson up with morphine, tempering his wrath enough to dance with him under the night sky, you’ll be impressed by how natural it feels to watch Fiennes having a mismatched friendship with an infected we’ve been markedly trained to fear.

The movie is often compelling in individual moments like this, or as when the Jimmy crew has a genuinely upsetting, violent encounter with an unwitting family. But as the movie flits between its two protagonists and tries to wrangle its broader sense of world-building and thematic exploration into the mix, it reveals a certain thinness, or at least a palpable vagueness, in the progression. Garland’s script is more polished here than the previous film, which struggled mechanically in its transition from tense zombie action to a more meditative road trip for a young boy and his dying mother, but it’s still not quite finely tuned. In its meager scale and some unexplored aspects of its central characters, it can also feel more like an interesting pit stop rather than a significant expansion of the franchise. 

Primarily, as a continuation of Spike’s story, The Bone Temple feels unfocused. For a child who, in the last movie, braved the dangerous mainland alone to get his mother to a doctor, then chose not to return home and spent a month living on his own in the wild, he has a striking lack of agency or even presence in this entry. In fairness, this script seems deliberately more interested in spotlighting and contrasting Kelson and Jimmy, but you can’t get around how that makes the overarching narrative trajectory of this trilogy feel disordered and slipshod. Much like the last movie, elements of his story exist purely as anchor points for the following film, primarily the stealthy connection that grows between Spike and one of the Jimmy members, played by Erin Kellyman. Elements such as this engage in the classic franchise carrot-dangling, emphasized further by a buzzy stinger for the next film. 

The strange relational dichotomies the film has with its own characters may seem so off-balance because it doesn’t feel like The Bone Temple has much to say about Jimmy—it’s a great performance from O’Connell, who taps into the characters vicious flamboyance with a balance of dark humor and menace, but the character is left wanting for a greater purpose within this world past a classic post-apocalyptic trope of being a deranged cult leader. His eventual clash with Kelson, too, feels like it has latent thematics sitting underneath the plot that never truly manifest. Broad religious imagery that accentuates the battling ethoses of two men—one trying to recreate life and one devoted to a world of death—underlines the film’s progression of plot scenarios, but always feels like too much of an unspecific suggestion to really mean anything.

But where The Bone Temple takes away, it also provides. If the film is missing the remarkable visual artistry of the first film, from which it also alters its narrative focus, it provides a welcome, heavy emphasis on Fiennes, who gives a curious, soulful performance that allows him to further carve out his own peculiar bearing within the world of these movies. And, for all of its more orthodox stylistic leanings, this is a film that is still bracingly odd where it counts, including an outright gonzo climactic set-piece that is far funnier and more baffling than you could reasonably expect. If nothing else, the jagged quality of the 28 Years Later films promotes a living, breathing quality to this world, turning a land of the undead into an always-mutating cinematic experiment. There are worse ideals to hang your movie franchise on.

Grade: B

Sony Pictures will release 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple only in theaters on January 16.