’28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’ Review: Ralph Fiennes Reigns

You’ve got to respect the grandiose insanity of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, a movie that has Ralph Fiennes’ Dr. Ian Kelson proclaiming, “Pride moves inside me like maggots in the corpse of Christ!” That doozy of a line comes at the peak of a dark rapture in which the survivalist medic uses the monument to death he has spent years constructing out of human skeletons as a stage for an epic piece of performance art set to “The Number of the Beast.” He’s putting on a show for sure, but his level of commitment makes him a man possessed.

This is a dystopian horror movie unafraid to mix an Iron Maiden antichrist anthem with dreamy Duran Duran synth pop in the trippiest display of bromance bliss you’ve ever seen. There’s even a Radiohead art-rock mantra that seems to come directly from Kelson’s mad-genius mind. Or at least from the eclectic vinyl collection he plays on a turntable powered by a hand-cranked generator. He’s a man who appears to have prepared for an apocalypse of virally infected flesh-eaters as if he were invited to be a guest on Desert Island Discs.

Do director Nia DaCosta and screenwriter Alex Garland make all this a coherent extension of the diseased near-future world created by Danny Boyle and Garland in three previous films, starting with 2002’s terrifying 28 Days Later? Maybe not in the strict sense of everything being entirely germane to the core story. But if audiences can accept a sequel that has veered into something closer to folk horror than its zombie-adjacent roots, they should be able to plug into its peculiar wavelength.

To start with the movie’s strongest asset, Fiennes is magnificent — sinewy and feral in appearance but erudite in manner, his isolation and years of living rough having done little to curb the magniloquence of a posh education. Kelson is a man of science and an atheist, but not without a touch of mysticism. The film is most effective when it stages a clash between the doctor’s radical but rational school of thought and the barbarism of paganistic religious fanaticism. (We’ll get to that in a minute.)

But before the fiery climax, there’s a thread that’s both poignant and daffy, involving Kelson’s evolving connection with the hulking Alpha specimen of the infected (the word zombie is never used) he christened Samson. Played once again by Chi Lewis-Parry with literal BDE, Samson has gotten a taste for the morphine darts Kelson shoots when he’s charging in for a kill, which allows first for tentative physical contact and then later for real communication, and possibly even a key to treating the Rage Virus psychosis.

The rest of Europe has given up on the virulent disease, quarantining the infected to the British Isles and leaving them to stain England’s green and pleasant land blood red. But Kelson has continued experimenting, finding a breakthrough that could lead to a potential cure when Samson becomes an unlikely stoner buddy. The doctor wants to know if memories of the man he was prior to infection still linger, or basic skills of language and understanding. “Or do I just give you peace and respite?” he asks, a touching softness in his voice.

This sense of compassion for the kill-hungry infected is new to the series, and while DaCosta and Garland take risks by playing tender moments between Kelson and Samson almost for laughs, the undeniable pathos provides a welcome break from the overriding tension.

The main narrative shift of this fourth installment, however, pulls the attention away from the infected to settle on a band of wandering Satanists led by Jack O’Connell’s menacingly charismatic “Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal.” Seen at the end of last year’s 28 Years Later rescuing the young protagonist Spike (Alfie Williams), Jimmy sports a tiara over his long blond locks and wears a track suit with a lot of bling. He refers to his followers as his “fingers,” all of them also named Jimmy and wearing shaggy blond Billie Eilish wigs in his image. These vicious youths fell the infected almost for sport, which undersells the source of terror so essential to the series.

After passing a savage initiation test, Spike is accepted into the band but finds it hard to stomach their breathtaking cruelty. Claiming to be serving the will of his father “Old Nick” — a folkloric nickname for the devil — favorite son Sir Jimmy and his cult roam the land dispensing “charity,” which basically means turning the agonizing mutilation and death of uninfected unfortunates into an unholy sacrament. We also call this torture porn.

Spike has a protector within the group in Jimmy Ink (Erin Kellyman), recruited at a young age but now sufficiently mature to interpret Jimmy’s sermonizing and his warped Messiah complex for the hokum that they are. When the band captures a farming family and starts flaying them alive, it becomes clear that Spike and possibly Jimmy Ink will need to make a break.

(One of the victims is a pregnant woman who escapes and disappears from the story, presumably to be picked up in the forthcoming third part of the 28 Years trilogy, on which Boyle is slated to return as director.)

I confess I found all the bloodletting and bombastic windbaggery more repugnant than scary or compelling, and while O’Connell is certainly persuasive as a disseminator of pain and dread with a malevolent glint in his eye, the actor did something similar more effectively in Sinners. Only when the two stories interconnect in the third act does DaCosta’s movie make a strong case for itself.  

That narrative convergence happens amusingly when Jimmy Ink is on an exploratory foray. Seeing Kelson, doused in orange iodine to protect against the infection, and “communing with a demon” in his palace of bones — meaning the suddenly docile Samson, high on opiates — the observer manages to convince even Sir Jimmy that the doctor is Old Nick. The encounter between “father and son” is a humdinger that reshapes the way into the next installment. It also segues to a satisfying coda in which a major figure from earlier in the franchise resurfaces.

Despite its unevenness, The Bone Temple delivers enough carnage and ritual sacrifice to satiate the horror flock. But most of its richest pleasures come down to Fiennes going balls to the wall with a truly memorable character — half lunatic and half visionary. He elevates the movie whenever he’s onscreen.

The visuals are typically dynamic and the English locations panoramic, even if DP Sean Bobbitt’s work doesn’t quite match the hard-driving energy of Boyle’s longtime cinematography collaborator Anthony Dod Mantle, whose twitchy images and striking light compositions were such an important part of shaping the films’ bleak world under siege. The standout craft element here is a powerful horror score by Hildur Gudnadottir that ranges from solemn, quasi-ecclesiastical passages to gut-churning, droning soundscapes.

Whatever the film’s weaknesses, there’s a lot to be said for Fiennes in heavy metal mode, lip-syncing “Six six six, the number of the beast / Hell and fire was spawned to be released.” When he eventually corrects the Jimmys on their misassumption that he’s Satan — “Nothing is. No one is. There’s just us.” — it’s one of the most desolate moments in this long-running series.