‘28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’ Review: Ralph Fiennes Commands a Shocking Successor to Last Year’s Most Welcome Revival

From a distance, the Bone Temple looks like some kind of Satanic shrine, conceived to keep wandering mortals away. More primitive than Stonehenge, more ominous than an elephant graveyard, this structure suggests a melding of imaginations between Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí and “Alien” nightmare dealer H.R. Giger, with its tall, slender towers of trussed-together bones reaching skyward, like bleached-white bamboo stalks.

At the center looms a pyramid of skulls, not so much a warning as a reminder — a “memento mori,” per the deranged medical doctor who stacked them — of all those lost to the pandemic, and the inevitable truth that we are one day destined to join them. What will future audiences make of this place? Part of the location’s power in last year’s “28 Years Later” was its symbolic potential, which Danny Boyle’s genre-expanding sequel introduced and ultimately demystified by that’s film end.

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The main characters, survivors of a zombie apocalypse, were appropriately wary of the Bone Temple and its orange-skinned guardian, whom Boyle introduced from afar, before ultimately revealing Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) to be an unlikely force for good. Darker and considerably more disturbing, but also highly dependent on viewers’ having already watched the previous movie, “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” follows three key characters.

Although the director has changed, with Boyle passing the baton to “Candyman” helmer Nia DaCosta (even as he expresses plans to return for a third and final installment), screenwriter Alex Garland wrote both films, in addition to series starter “28 Days Later” nearly 28 years ago. The decades-spanning arc has been a wildly unpredictable thrill ride-cum-social allegory thus far, and there’s no denying the deeply unsettling overarching vision that seems to be emerging.

“The Bone Temple” focuses primarily on Ian and his reckless attempts to understand the victims of the Rage virus, especially the “alphas,” those ultra-strong, distractingly endowed zombies who can effortlessly rip off a man’s head, while leaving the spinal column intact. After distancing itself from George A. Romero’s “living dead” legacy, the franchise finally seems comfortable with using the “Z-word,” even going so far as to dangle the possibility that they could be saved … or at least treated, as Ian charitably applies his “do no harm” Hippocratic mentality to the infected.

The word “charity” takes on a twisted new meaning here. Before circling back to the mad doctor, “The Bone Temple” opens with Spike (Alfie Williams), the brave young lad who ventured out with his terminally ill mother, only to fall in with scally evangelist Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) and his rogue gang of “Fingers.” A demented twist on the hooligan Droogs of “A Clockwork Orange,” Jimmy witnessed his God-fearing father, a rural vicar, possessed by the virus, and he has since sworn his allegiance to “Old Nick” (i.e. the devil), creating a pseudo-cult of cruelty and fear with himself as its self-anointed “sir lord.”

While closer to the outrageous heavy-metal villains of “Mad Max” movies than those we typically find in zombie movies, the Jimmy Crystal character is consistent with the back stretch of the original film, in which renegade soldiers (who’ve established a corrupt micro-society in a secluded country mansion) proved more fearsome than the infected. Once again, Garland’s thesis seems to be that men, when left to their own devices, will inevitably give in to their most craven impulses.

The horror of “The Bone Temple” is therefore concentrated in the idea of undoing whatever progress millennia of culture and civilization have achieved, reverting instead to whatever our species’ base instincts might be, whether that’s the animal hunger of brain-eating zombies or the godless power grabs of crazed men like Jimmy Crystal. If given a choice between the two, Ian seems more confident about the zombies — a dynamic DaCosta unnervingly reinforces from the beginning, as Jimmy initiates Spike as one of his seven “Fingers” by forcing the boy to kill another of his followers.

“The Bone Temple” turns out to be far more bloody than the earlier films in the franchise, stoking shock and fear from gratuitous acts of sadism perpetrated by Jimmy Crystal and his gang. If this group earlier struck you as some kind of zombie-hunting patrol, committed to ridding England of the infected, think again. Here, they are revealed to be a nihilistic band of renegade Satanists, who pillage for pleasure, invading homes (the “Clockwork Orange” connection is most acute when they raid a farmhouse and torture its inhabitants) and killing all who cross their path.

DaCosta establishes their barbarity early on and proceeds to make Jimmy one of modern horror’s most twisted antagonists. It’s a curious coincidence that O’Connell was also cast as the roaming vampire Remmick in last year’s “Sinners,” as these two characters complement one another: O’Connell plays both villains as soft-spoken and seductive, affecting a kind of insincere gentility which is quickly revealed to be a ruse. Here, he sports long blond hair (his followers, all rechristened with “Jimmy”-adjacent names, wear straw-colored wigs) and rotten, off-color teeth, which suggest a menacing mouth full of flint corn.

Where some came away from “28 Years Later” feeling like it hadn’t been scary enough (a fair critique, given the film’s higher goal of offering audiences a chance to process and grieve the real-world pandemic we’d collectively endured), DaCosta treats “The Bone Temple” as hardcore horror. The experience still provides stretches of introspection and calm, especially between Ian and the alpha he calls “Samson” (Chi Lewis-Parry). But such scenes provide only temporary reprieve from the tension, while outbursts of violence are next-level gory, from the sight of an innocent family tied up and flayed to the film’s climactic crucifixion (which inspires the loudest of many improbable laughs).

Compared to the earlier films in the series, including the more straightforward outlier “28 Weeks Later,” DaCosta’s contribution feels the most polished. That doesn’t exactly make it better than Boyle’s films, robbing the experience of some of its renegade energy, as cinematographer Sean Bobbitt breaks from the jagged experimental techniques Anthony Dod Mantle introduced in the previous entry. Where things felt gritty and immersive last time around — the ravenous handheld footage intercut with arcane eye-of-God imagery — everything is clearly being staged for our benefit here.

Through it all, Fiennes acts up a storm as the man of science torn between profound grief for an extinguished society and a near-psychotic willingness to break the rules to restore anything resembling order. It’s an all-in performance that pays off on multiple levels, whether watching Ian “treat” Samson with a tenderness that recalls how the blind hermit “saw” Frankenstein’s monster or via his bonkers commitment to a Bone Temple ceremony on par with the hallucinatory apex of “Apocalypse Now.” For genre aficionados, it’s bold, mind-bending work which satisfies that so-often-frustrated craving: for a zombie movie with brains.