Erupting forth mere minutes (or, at most, an hour) after the ending cliffhanger of last year’s 28 Years Later, director Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple follows its predecessor with scary prescience and brutal horror. Where 28 Years Later asked us to focus on a boy’s forced journey into maturity, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple continues this journey, but under decidedly more psychotic and terrifying circumstances. Taking the reins from Danny Boyle, DaCosta uses a different, more ghastly approach to writer Alex Garland’s script—a script which runs on bicameral tracks as it dissects the loss of humanity and its simultaneous redemption.
Before now, violence in this series was easy to understand, as it was mostly the byproduct of an infection that the original film showed to be caused by overexposure to images of death, riots, anger, and hate. The Rage Virus was easily transmitted by exposure to infected blood or being bitten by an infected person; once exposed, it was a matter of seconds before the receiver turned into a nightmare version of itself, running straight at the uninfected to spread the disease. And the more the disease spreads, the harder it gets for people to do the right thing or to stand and fight. Representing anger endemic to humans, the Rage Virus consumed its victims whole, creating a new species that could only survive by passing the disease onto others or killing them outright. It was novel in 2002, but it’s a stark statement on our current sociopolitical climate, a statement that DaCosta and Garland take further to expose our own selves as the perpetrators of ugliness which meager resistance cannot hold back.
However, this new chapter dispenses with what we already know about and expect from the infected, instead driving us into mourning the loss of common sense, humanity, facts, and science, having replaced it (in this film, at least) with religious mania, abject nihilism, and utter cruelty. (Yet again, another statement on our society in 2026.) Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) and his gang of kids, whom he calls “The Fingers,” announced themselves in the closing seconds of the previous film, saving Spike (Alfie Williams) from a pack of infected humans and displaying an extraordinary amount of glee as they dispatch these intruders. As Jimmy has survived into young adulthood without his family (massacred in the opening minutes of 28 Years Later), adult guidance, or any kind of morals outside of those found in the TV shows he watched as a child, he has fashioned himself into a tracksuit-wearing boy-god, believing that all around him is his for the taking.
From the beginning, Alfie Williams has us firmly in Spike’s corner, turning in a marvelous portrayal of a kid whose initial thoughts of salvation have turned quickly to shocking fear. The meek Spike is totally out of his depth, evident from his initial encounter with Jimmy and the Fingers—all of whom have been renamed “Jimmy” or some form thereof—and he’s about to be pushed even further in the opening minutes. While Jimmy sits on high, Spike is surrounded by the Fingers in an empty rec center pool, handed a knife, and told to either kill his opponent and take the deceased’s place or let his opponent kill him. Reintroducing Spike, Jimmy, and the Fingers this way is better than the usual recap or reacclimation; it’s a visceral, in-the-moment visualization of what each person represents in this continual cycle of violence that does way more damage (both literally and figuratively) than pausing to waste time reminding us of who they are.
There’s no way the confusion, fear, and innocence engendered in Spike can stand up to the feral savagery of Jimmy and the Fingers, but we wouldn’t have much of a movie if Spike fails here, would we? As part of Jimmy’s gang, Spike has to witness these children—most of whom are in Spike’s age range—follow Jimmy’s every order, from ordering Jimmima (Emma Laird) to dance like a Teletubby to having another Finger kill innocent people. With each passing moment, Spike’s fight to stay alive and on the right side of morality grows harder, needing to survive with this little “community” but unable to bring himself to fully be part of it. And although most of them know what he’s asking them to do is disgusting and wrong, they still align with the stronger, crazier person in the room, committing absurdities and atrocities at his fancy because they’ve tied themselves to him.
Loyalty means everything to Jimmy, who continually refers to himself as the son of “Old Nick” (Satan), a figure in Jimmy’s tilted mind who tells him where to go, what to do, and whom to kill. And not just whom to kill; how to kill them. In a stomach-turning bit of business, a family is set upon by Jimmy and the Fingers—so named because he believes that they are Nick’s hand, carrying out his orders—and toyed with, tortured, and barbarically flayed alive, all at what Jimmy says is Nick’s command. Even worse is what he calls this act: “Giving them charity.” Brutality is dressed up in benevolence, with Jimmy’s sweet, condescending tones masking his pure evil. His humanity is totally lost, with no end to his depravity; Jack O’Connell swings us wildly between being slyly controlling, confused at the unknown, and alarmingly furious when crossed. The performance O’Connell gives is one of total id; one can see how O’Connell makes Jimmy spin each situation to maximize his inhumane delight, and it’s absolutely frightening.
Conversely, the movie counters with true benevolence in the returning Dr. Ian Kelson’s (Ralph Fiennes) efforts to rehumanize the intimidating Alpha we saw in the first film, a horrifying man he calls Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry). Seen as having higher intelligence and greater strength than other infected humans, Samson is a scary sight; his muscular, naked body is slathered in gore from his victims, and his red-rimmed eyes blaze with the intensity of the virus. But between Kelson and Samson’s encounters shown in the first film and now, both seem to have reached a weird understanding, in that whenever Samson approaches Kelson’s camp, he knows he’s going to get shot with a morphine arrow—a strange experiment in which Kelson seeks to address the symptoms of the virus with his dwindling medical supplies.
Both Ralph Fiennes and Chi Lewis-Parry form this film’s emotional bond with their characters, literally laying everything bare and bringing us back to square one. It’s their scenes that act as a respite from Jimmy’s homicidal lunacy, which is quite unexpected, considering that the infected are the ones lurking in the shadows, waiting to attack without abandon. But DaCosta gives us these calming moments—which, truthfully, are not without their own brand of tension, as we see early on what Samson is capable of doing to a human head—to remind us that with time and care, problems can be solved and peaceable solutions can be implemented. The pairing of Fiennes and Lewis-Parry is marvelously peculiar, completely irrational, and impossibly outstanding, and DaCosta sets them off well against each other.
In case you’re wondering, yes—it’s not a question of if, but when the roads these two factions are traveling will converge. Throughout the film, we see the good (Spike, Kelson, Samson, and one of the Fingers who may not be totally on board with Jimmy’s program), the evil (Jimmy, the rest of the Fingers, and the infected), and those caught between them. Nia DaCosta steps confidently into the director’s chair and welcomes us into this world of pain, regret, and horror by elevating Alex Garland’s script with bold visual bombast while maintaining a steady hand on the film’s social commentary. Even though we get some gallows humor laughs, the rest of the film is deadly serious in its intent to turn the spotlight on ourselves, with the thinnest of veils separating actions and personalities in the film from those we see in everyday news and media. To say 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is uncomfortable would be the understatement of this young year, but it’s a necessary discomfort, because this film is a mirror being held up to our own faces, depicting the inhumanity we either deny or espouse. The trouble is that the infected had no choice, whereas we have the choice to go along with the brutality or build something better; this movie shows us both and asks us where we stand at this divide.
