Young Spike is now part of a vicious crew of killers, while Dr Ian Kelson believes he might be able to cure the Rage virus.
Duran Duran said in the 1980s that they wanted to be the band to dance to when the Bomb drops, so it’s fitting that in this alternative apocalypse Dr Ian Kelson spends his days bopping to Girls on Film and Rio among his bone towers.
He has broad tastes. In one ear- and eye-popping scene he lip syncs to Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast – rustled up on vinyl from his bunker – while pretending to be Satan. But it’s not like there’s been anyone around to critique his musical choices for 28 years.
This is the second in the 28 Years Later trilogy. Last summer’s film saw 12 year old Spike, grieving for his dead mother, leaving the relative safety of Holy Island to trek alone through the countryside. In the final scene, cornered by a group of infected, he was saved by a posse of young men and women all called Jimmy, who appeared to have taken as their aesthetic the late TV presenter Jimmy Savile: platinum blond wigs, gold jewellery, tracksuits.
The Bone Temple picks up where the last film left off, with Spike joining Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) and his Jimmy acolytes, known as the Fingers. And frankly it’s a case of out of the frying pan, into the fire.
Our first Spike sighting sets the tone of psychopathic cruelty and offbeat humour as Jimmy Crystal forces the boy to fight another Jimmy, Jimmy Shite (Connor Newall), to the death for his own place in the group, with Spike pulling down his opponent’s trousers and fatally stabbing him in the leg. A later, drawn-out barn scene, when the Jimmys invade the sanctuary of another group of survivors, is utterly gruesome.
Director Nia DaCosta has done an incredible job shepherding the madcap energies, oddball characters, darkness and light into a phenomenal film that is both terrifying and hopeful. This instalment has an 18 certificate and she is not afraid to linger on the horrific results of the choices characters have made and what they have become. The main threat is not coming from the infected, who anyway are instinctive rather than deliberately merciless, but from other people.
In fact apart from the Alpha, Samson, there aren’t many infected in The Bone Temple. The focus is the all too human Jimmys, and the psychotic Jimmy Crystal. O’Connell offers up a brilliantly horrifying performance of an opportunistic sadist but also a fervent believer, while hinting that maybe underneath the grinning cruelty is the kernel of the terrified child inside who never grew up. We saw Jimmy Crystal as a boy in a flashback in the last film, seeking shelter in church while his fire-and-brimstone minister father welcomed the infected horde. The traumatised child is now an adult psychopath who thinks Satan is his dad.
Meanwhile in his ossuary Dr Ian Kelson, Whitley Bay GP turned chief witness and mourner to the nation’s calamity, continues to honour the infected and uninfected dead by cooking their bodies and adding their bones to his Memento Mori.
Samson (a restrained and thoughtful Chi Lewis-Parry) is a regular visitor, grown addicted to the morphine Kelson kept firing at him to keep him away. It’s a father-son relationship which is dangerous but also comical, as Kelson tries a mixture of drugs and talking therapies with the naked giant to prove his suspicions that the virus sits atop one’s mind rather than destroying it, and therefore can be treated.
Jimmy Crystal is a different kettle of fish who only knows how to inflict pain, and throws away his chance of redemption. Still, it does lead to that spectacular Ian Maiden tribute act – forced from Kelson under threat of a painful death to pretend to the Fingers that he is indeed Satan, and Jimmy’s dad.
Fiennes is phenomenal as the lonely, empathic but dryly witty Dr Kelson. The satanic singalong may show him at his most ballsy, but the tender, funny scenes with Samson as they build their relationship, sitting together on the banks of the river, are the essence of Kelson.
The remarkable Alfie Williams holds his own as Spike, a child who has placed himself in an adult world, trying not to cry as Jimmy Crystal threatens him in front of the burning barn. It is this that brings him back to Kelson, when the increasingly protective Jimmy Ink (Erin Kellyman) suggests the reddish-skinned doctor may be Old Nick himself.
Kellyman has a real presence even as her character quietly watches and thinks. Women in this film are unsentimental and for once motherhood isn’t sanctified. A pregnant woman refuses to take Spike with her; Kelson drags the body of the infected woman who gave birth to baby Isla in the last film back to his oven. Jimmy Ink, Spike’s erstwhile protector, has done terrible things.
Writer Alex Garland continues to demand we reflect on our own country, and the constant battles we face: progress vs stagnation, rationality vs fear, good vs evil, rehabilitation vs moral decline. Both Jimmy Crystal and Samson are psychotic, and both kill in horrible ways (one flays people, the other pulls off their heads and attached spinal cords). But the actions of both stem from childhoods torn apart by the virus. And both circle Dr Kelson – scientist, atheist and now ironically the nearest there is to god – who gets to decide if either can be saved.
As the second film in a trilogy it isn’t surprising that the old guard is dying off and hope taking root. The past is fading, a trauma in itself. Kelson admits he remembers mostly the “certainty” of life before. Jimmy Crystal has twisted his memories to make sense of his childhood and his parents. The Jimmys are doubting their leader and privately mocking his extravagant claims, while Kelson may have found a cure for The Rage virus. Meanwhile Samson is rediscovering sounds and pictures from his youth as the mental pain of his infection recedes, and young Spike is still looking for pastures new.
As usual the imagery is enjoyably on the nose. Kelson – Jesus and Louis Pasteur rolled into one – threatened with death, drags a giant cross. Other references are sneakier: our trains don’t run, there’s only one GP for hundreds of miles and the drugs are increasingly hard to source. Still at least you just need to turn up to get an appointment.
Note: there is no mid or end credits scene
The Bone Temple ending and plot recap
The Bone Temple: faith, family, Duran Duran and fake tan
Watch the official trailer for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple