Nia DaCosta takes the baton passed by Danny Boyle after last summer’s striking 28 Years Later to deliver a powerful, compelling and at times quite disturbing movie that’s really part two of the story so deftly set up by the “franchise” creators Boyle and writer Alex Garland last year.
The Bone Temple is a much more downbeat affair (although not without moments of pitch-black humour) that focuses not so much on the infected but on the world (well, the UK… the last film slightly frustratingly suggested that the rest of the world escaped the worst of the outbreak) that has sprung up around them in the wake of the rage virus carnage depicted in the first film way back in 2002.
Picking up from the end of the previous film, young Spike (Alfie Williams) has been recruited into the gang of “Jimmies” – all wearing blonde wigs, cheap tracksuits and bedecked with gaudy bling. They’re led by the charismatic but psychopathic Lord Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), who rules by fear by telling his followers that he is the son of Satan and receives occasional visitations from Old Nick. The Jimmies travel the country terrorising survivors of the infection and imposing Sir Jimmy’s own form of “charity” upon those who cross their path.
The appearance of the Jimmies at the climax of 28 Years Later was controversial to say the least, due to their unsettling resemblance to a certain disgraced deceased DJ and broadcaster; the resemblance is never remarked upon here but the analogy is clear – these are fictional monsters based on the enduring image of a real-life one.
Elsewhere, Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) is still living in isolation amongst his Bone Temple, his ossuary to the dead, listening to Duran Duran on his wind-up gramophone and forging an unlikely kinship with monstrous Alpha infected Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) with the help of morphine-tipped darts that dull Samson’s rage tendencies. Eventually the paths of the Jimmies and Kelson cross – with devastating consequences for both sides.
The Bone Temple is a masterpiece of dread and horror, but it’s an expertly told story full of humanity in a world where it’s in short supply. Violence is sharp, brutal and bloody, and the appalling reign of terror carried out by the Jimmies is in sharp contrast to Kelson’s solitary, disconnected world where he is risking his own life in the hope of finding a way to quell the more psychopathic effects of the rage virus.
These are two worldviews that are never going to be easy bedfellows, and Garland’s beautifully crafted script, allied to DaCosta’s extraordinarily powerful and sensitive direction, and with hair-raising performances from Fiennes and O’Connell especially, creates a film that transcends the horror genre in which it ostensibly, if uneasily, sits.
The Bone Temple confounds and surpasses expectations. It’s the best in the series by some way and it thrillingly sets up the third entry in this new trilogy, recently greenlit and hopefully entering production sooner rather than later. A bold, bleak, but breathtakingly accomplished start to a new year of genre cinema.
28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE is in cinemas now.
