There are echoes of Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple throughout history.
Echoes of how the first two Europeans to permanently inhabit Australia who, once marooned there, quickly coalesced into a marauding band of merciless torturers. Their leader maintained order and cohesion by promising his seemingly mild-mannered followers their victims’ plunder, and the surprisingly ecstatic experience of elaborate, ritualistic violence.
Or from 1941 when, during an especially terrible winter, two men orchestrated the deaths of nine community members on Hudson Bay’s Belcher Island — proclaiming themselves to be Jesus and God and that they would save the remote community through ritualistic violence.
Because in DaCosta’s triumphant zombie-apocalypse sequel — a followup to the Danny Boyle-directed 28 Years Later — we witness more of the same: how easily communal systems for good can be can be co-opted to vicious ends.
An unsettling, unnerving — and at times, simply unpalatable — orgy of gore, sadism and misguided religious fervour, The Bone Temple will likely be, to many, far too much.
But for those able to stomach it, it delivers on not only thrilling action. It delivers not only superb, hauntingly committed performances. It delivers not only a return to cohesive, and satisfying plotting after the previous film. It also delivers an insightful and original message on the origins of baroque, systematized cruelty, its appetizing value to leaders — and potential strategies to defeat it.
But to make sense of DaCosta’s outing, you need to know how the prior film ends: a slight spoiler, so turn away from your screens now if you haven’t had time to check it out.
With the British Isles still beset by the “rage virus” — which turns its quarantined citizens into seemingly mindless cannibals — the few uninfected left alive have hunkered down in isolated, fenced-off communities.
Spike (Alfie Williams) is one of them; a skittish tween who encountered a group of tracksuit-wearing football hooligan types at the end of his travels in 28 Years Later, which was written and filmed in conjunction with The Bone Temple.
But The Bone Temple shifts the focus to them. Each sports a bleach-blonde wig, and each refers to themselves as “Jimmy.” Or in one case, “Jimmima” (Emma Laird).
They are led by, who else, but Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell): a swaggering, sociopathic and charismatic cult leader by way of Pirates of the Caribbean’s Capt. Jack Sparrow.
To join their gang, they laughingly force a terrified Spike to kill an existing member. They flay the chests of any unsuspecting survivors they encounter. And they do it all to worship “Old Nick” — leader-Jimmy’s dimly recalled memory of Satan, who, he says, demands acts of “charity.”
Unfortunately for those they dole it out to, charity in this case is pain. And lots of it.
WATCH | 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple trailer:
Regret, terror, desperation
How much the leader believes his own stories, versus seeing them as a useful way to keep his underlings under him, is immediately called into question — one of DaCosta and writer Alex Garland’s smartest choices. Where 28 Years Later couched itself as almost wholly a coming-of-age story that clunkily sees Spike come into his own, The Bone Temple both largely sidelines him, and intentionally invalidates any confident, action hero qualities he’d previously built up.
Instead what we get is closer to “horrors of war through the eyes of a child” films like Come and See or The Painted Bird. When Spike does venture close to the plot, it’s more to show the pathetic, woe-filled regret, terror and desperation of someone who doesn’t see an apocalypse as an opportunity.
More important, and more proficiently handled this time around, are the other players. That includes Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), the industrious physician who has committed the rest of his days to building a towering ossuary: a monument of bones, taken from the fallen infected, to both honour them and remind himself that he too, will one day die.
It also includes Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) the towering, famously nude “alpha” zombie from the previous movie, whom Kelson comes to know far more closely in this outing. Both become far less cartoonish this time around, and both are given such impressive opportunities to shine that the entire film could focus on them and still be called one of the best of the year.
Lessons learned
But of course we get more: there’s the particularly deadly Jimmy acolyte played by Erin Kellyman, whose complex and fraught relationship with both Spike and leader-Jimmy injects another layer of endlessly entertaining nuance. But most notably, it’s O’Connell that offers us something to sink our teeth into. Sporting an inverted cross around his neck (in his mind a Satanic symbol, though in actuality a Catholic sign of humility) this leader similarly inverts the tenets of Christianity.
In a plot absolutely dripping with allusions to Jesus, Garland and DaCosta cryptically reinterpret the martyrdom story, while showing how effectively and intractably narratives about a chosen group saving the world can be used to motivate gleeful violence.
Like innumerable tragedies that have played out through history — and even some playing out today — The Bone Temple shows how the familiar can quite easily be turned on its head to guide savagery, either by followers who deeply believe the message, or simply fear it being turned around on them. And that this can be accomplished even when that savagery goes completely against the supposed intents of those systems.
The Bone Temple may do so in an oppressively dour atmosphere — one which will likely be far too pessimistic for large swatches of theatregoers. But, without giving too much away, it also offers a way out: the potential for resisting such systems by identifying them, and refusing to sacrifice your humanity in order to build a flimsy, temporary shelter for yourself.
And for a movie about screaming naked zombies, it’s a surprisingly timely — and endlessly rewarding — point to make.
