Review: 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
- cepmurphywrites
- 45 minutes ago
- 4 min read
By Charles E.P. Murphy
In 2002, the "rage virus" swept through Britain; everyone infected went rabid and turned on the people around them. The world quarantined the nation and abandoned all who hadn't managed to flee.
Twenty eight years later, the ageing Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), builder of a vast memorial hewn from human bones, makes a tentative contact with the Alpha infected he's dubbed 'Samson' (Chi Lewis-Parry). The young Spike (Alfie Williams), however, has met something worse than the infected: the cult of "Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal" (Jack O'Connell), a psychopath who tells his horde of "Jimmy's" that the Devil wishes him to purge the land of everyone his infection has left standing...
The Bone Temple is a horror film, and writer Alex Garland and director Nia DaCosta go all out on the horror for Jimmy and his "Fingers". The infected got a lot of attention in this film's immediate predecessor, 28 Years Later, with new types of infected, new social dynamics, types of scenes we hadn't seen before - and while the scenes with Samson definitely go places (and Garland and DaCosta are extremely brave in going that far and bending the franchise), they're a background threat here. Jimmy is the big bad. Jimmy is an unsettling, manipulative, charismatic sadist and however nasty all the other Jimmy's are, you know they're that way because this bastard broke them. The threat to Spike isn't that Jimmy's going to kill him, it's that Jimmy's going to succeed in making him another Jimmy; that he's going to be made to torture and murder until he forgets it horrifies him. In a previous era, the Sir Lord would be a Charles Manson knock-off.
Early in the film, we see what Samson and his infected horde do when they run into a normal human. It's an explosive scene of lurid, gory violence. It's also more lurid on-screen than what Jimmy has his cult do to people. We get a good close up of Samson eating a corpse but cut away from what the cult does as they do it. Implicitly, this tells us their violence is worse. Samson is doing this because he's ill, the virus makes him think the non-infected are a hateful threat; Jimmy is making a conscious choice to inflict his own trauma downwards. As with the soldiers in 28 Days Later, normal humans are the worst threat.
What about the AH? 28 Years Later was a sweeping epic that made great use of its 2000s-apocalypse AH setting. An isolated community on Lindisfarne lived out of the scavenged relics of the old world; decaying old trains and petrol stations dotted the landscape; and we briefly saw the modern world via trapped European soldiers, their smartphones and concepts seen as alien by the British. The Bone Temple narrows the focus into a smaller area and a smaller cast, primarily Kelson, Spike, Samson, and the odious Jimmy's. We still see wreckage (the train makes an appearance again) but less of it, with writer Alex Garland and director Nia DaCosta deciding we've got the point from the first one.
What glimpses of the AH apocalypse we get here are character-focused and a bit more messed up. Jimmy Crystal has turned a vaguely-remembered Jimmy Savile's image and catchphrases (likely second-hand or from cameos as he'd be too young to have seen his shows) into the trappings of a cult, his "Fingers" and their multicoloured tracksuits may (so a fan theory goes) be based on his memories of Power Rangers, and he regales his brainwashed Jimmy's and doomed victims with what he remembers of watching the Tellytubbies. We know that's the last show young Jimmy saw before the infected broke into his house (as seen in the previous film), nobody else knows what the hell he's talking about; it's just as much a myth to them as Old Nick. We, the audience, know Savile was a monstrous predator, we see his image as a threat, but Jimmy Crystal doesn't know this, he's likely borrowing the trappings of something comforting and accidentally brings out the horror that lay under it. A character's flashback to the pre-apocalypse days is the result of drugs and treated as a trip, first with the sounds of old trains coming from nowhere before we eventually see images that can't be fully understood.
And not just Spike but most of the younger characters don't know any different. Kelson admits in one scene he no longer remembers much of what it was actually like in the old days. The 1990s and early 2000s is already fading memory & old photos for a chunk of the film's audience and not even that for the younger adults in it, and The Bone Temple runs with that, heightens it: the vague memories are corrupted, the past is something either unknowable or weaponised against us. Rather like, in fact, how reactionary nostalgic accounts on the internet are doing it in real life. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a confident, brutal film.
Charles EP Murphy is an author who, among other works, wrote the books Chamberlain Resigns, and other things that did not happen and Comics of Infinite Earths for Sea Lion.