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Trains and heroin. There are moments when you have to remind yourself that it’s Nia DaCosta (director) and Alex Garland (screenwriter) behind this quick-fire 28 Years Later sequel and not Danny Boyle and John Hodge reimagining that heady slice of ’90s pop-culture in a bled-out Britain. Here, though, it’s the English who are blissed-out on junk and the Scots who are the wankers. The trains are a bit more overgrown, too.
The zombies are thinner on the ground in this instalment, presumably biding their time for Danny Boyle’s threequel, and that’s okay. There’s still some hyper-kinetic action – DaCosta (Candyman) and cinematographer Sean Bobbitt, mix visceral GoPro sequences with stately long shots to deliver the best-looking film in the franchise – but most of the horror plays out with sticky intimacy here as the focus switches to two humans and an Alpha.
A fabulously malevolent Jack O’Connell is Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, introduced by 28 Years Later as a Scottish preacher’s son narrowly surviving the zombie apocalypse and as a Jimmy Savile-styled cult leader in its jarring epilogue. He roams the land with a gang of wig-and-tracksuit-wearing acolytes, executing Satanic violence on anyone they come across in the name of ‘Old Nick’. The infected aren’t the source of the greatest cruelty here. Like Christopher Ecclestone’s soldiers in 28 Days Later, humanity has reclaimed that crown.
On the side of the angels (or perhaps the only one left), Ralph Fiennes returns as GP-turned-survivalist Dr Ian Kelson, scratching away at a cure for the virus in the boneyard memorial he’s forged from the dead to a vinyl collection of New Romantic bangers. His interactions with hulking Alpha zombie Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) blossom into a strange bromance over daily self-administered morphine shots. While Kelson is on screen, there’s redemption, even a hope for revival. With Crystal, there’s only a depravity that, in one torture scene, pushes hard at the bounds of taste. When this pair of special actors finally share the stage, it’s electrifying.
This is simultaneously the nastiest and most soulful of the franchise to date
The Bone Temple is one of those rare sequels that doesn’t just improve on its predecessor, it improves it. The gruelling opening, a violent initiation ritual below the waterslides of a broken-down leisure centre, makes sense of 28 Years Later’s larky coda. Cobbled together pageantry and ritual is how Crystal controls his disciples. Haunted young survivor Spike (Alfie Williams) is co-opted into this coterie of psychos, a horrified witness to unspeakable acts.
This is simultaneously the nastiest and most soulful of the franchise to date – and the most probing. Credit to Garland’s nuts-bold script, his richest since Ex Machina. The ideas explored, from mental illness, to addiction, to the meaning of civic duty in a world without civilisation, coalesce into one big one: how a few snatched memories of the past, many warped and twisted by time, can be cobbled together into new ways of living.
And, as the terrifying Crystal amply demonstrates, new ways of killing.
In cinemas worldwide Fri Jan 15.