28 Years Later, Danny Boyle’s ace return to the 28 Days later series, was one of last year’s most pleasant cinematic surprises. Combining serious thrills with creeping suspense and a light dusting of social commentary, it also ended with one hell of a cliffhanger, as its protagonist, Alfie Williams’s young Spike, found himself in the hands of a gang of psychotic Jimmy Savile-styled desperadoes, led by Jack O’Connell’s sinister Lord Jimmy Crystal. Audiences were keen to see how Candyman and Hedda director Nia DaCosta could pick up the pieces in the next installment, The Bone Temple – once again scripted by Alex Garland – and how the narrative threads sewn into the first picture might continue.
DaCosta is a fascinating filmmaker, if not the Oscar-winning A-lister that Boyle is, and several of her aesthetic choices here are remarkably bold. If you’ve seen the first film – and it’s pretty much obligatory – then you’ll know the two protagonists: Spike and Ralph Fiennes’s iodine-coated Dr. Kelson, who is investigating the effect that various drugs have on “the infected,” as the zombies are known. The Duran Duran-loving medic forms an unexpected but rather lovely bromance of sorts with Samson, the alpha male of the infected, and gets all the script’s best, funniest lines.
The film’s two parallel strands dovetail towards the end. The result is perhaps the most interesting scene in the film. Before then, however, DaCosta offers some of the most memorably unpleasant scenes of violence seen in a mainstream studio picture for some time. O’Connell’s leering Jimmy is a psychopath, and he enjoys what he calls “charity,” namely the slow and horrible torture of his victims; there is a scene in a barn, complete with bloody eviscerations of some unfortunates, that showcases near-unwatchable gore, even before you get onto the standard head and spine-ripping, brain-eating horror that you’d expect from a zombie picture.
The Bone Temple is considerably more gruesome than the comparatively restrained predecessor, and DaCosta abandons Boyle’s nods at folk horror (no isolated self-sufficient community this time around) and attention-grabbing editing choices, which at some points in the first film even patched in footage from Laurence Olivier’s Henry V. The new movie is more classical – though hardly old-fashioned. This extends as well to the soundtrack, which is a brooding orchestral score by the Oscar-winning composer Hildur Guðnadóttir. This choice is especially revealing when you remember that the first film’s score featured such musicians as the hip-hop act Young Fathers.
The picture short-changes Williams, who has little to do other than look horrified at the barbarity he is exposed to, but Fiennes, who now takes center stage, is magnificent as the compassionate and decent Kelson, whose odd-couple relationship with the terrifying infected gives the film its heart.
It would of course be a spoiler to reveal how the mayhem resolves itself, but the finale offers the return of a familiar face and hints at what a third, Boyle-directed picture might involve. But to be honest, I am not sure what exactly a fifth 28 Days film is really going to offer audiences. While I preferred 28 Years Later to The Bone Temple, both are uncommonly intelligent and thoughtful pictures that genuinely attempt to do something new and boundary-pushing in a well-worn genre. At a time when zombie films long ago became tiresome exercises in repetition, credit must go to Boyle, Garland and DaCosta for finding a fresh angle, and even if one hopes for a profundity that never quite arrives, this is still (decapitated) head and shoulders above virtually everything else in the horror genre over the past few years.
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