Having barely recovered from the heart-pounding experience of 28 Years Later, it’s time for the next instalment. After waiting over two decades since 28 Days Later (28 Weeks Later isn’t canon), two zombie apocalypse updates come at once. We’re not complaining.
For 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Danny Boyle has handed over the directorial reins to Nia DaCosta, the buzzy director currently garnering Oscar contender status for Hedda. DaCosta Boyle remains as producer, with the script once again written by Alex Garland.
Whereas 28 Years Later wrestled with ideas about British nationalism, isolationism, and patriarchy, DaCosta’s Bone Temple is an even darker, gore-slicked thing that slithers around in your skull. Humanity, and the depravity to which it can stoop when religion is perverted, cults flourish in isolation, and children are groomed for violence, are the central themes here. The Rage Virus is firmly a B-plot, and humans prove far sicker in their impulses than the infected.
We start right where the last film left off on the quarantined English mainland, with our boy hero Spike (Alfie Allen) in the clutches of Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) and his gang of feral children. Decked out in blonde wigs and shell suits, Jimmy and his mini-me acolytes are frozen in the remnants of 90s youth culture. In this timeline, Jimmy Saville’s horrific crimes never came to light, making the concept of grown man leading children in a dress-up game where the Teletubbies are gospel hideously perverse to a contemporary audience.
Jimmy only has a set number of followers at any time (he calls them, creepily, his ‘fingers’), so to survive Spike must kill or be killed by one of the existing Jimmies (each youth takes a version of the name, in classic cult brainwashing tactics). It’s a brutal knife-fight in an abandoned water park, with a childish game of pantsing ending in gory arterial spray. Spike survives and gets his own gross wig to wear as reward, but his journey into hell is only just beginning.
The gang roams the land, easily dispatching infected they come across as they inflict home invasion nightmares on unsuspecting survivors holed up in rural compounds. Jimmy, orphaned son of the deranged priest from the cold open of 28 Years Later, has got some pretty messed up ideas about charity and mercy in his sermons, delivered with scenery-chewing aplomb by O’Connell.
