After close to two decades of waiting, two 28 Days Later sequels have arrived in half a year. It’s a strange, stuffed release schedule, especially for two such different outings, and could have backfired. But while The Bone Temple lacks the invention or scope of its predecessor, perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is that it doesn’t overstay its welcome.
If you have followed Indy Film Library for long, you will already know that Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 28 Days Later was a formative moment for me as a horror-lover. And you will know how much it meant to me that when, after years in the wilderness, the pair revived the series last summer, I was utterly enamoured with the world they created.
When I heard there would be another sequel, just six months later, I was relieved not to have to wait until I was pushing 50 to see how things might pan out – but also wary that things might feel rushed. So much so, that in a time of stress (finding a new place to live, amid the Dutch housing crisis), my inevitable anxiety dreams hinged upon seeing The Bone Temple, and realising it sucked.
I can breathe another sigh of relief now, because not only did I manage to find a new address in Amsterdam, but 15 days after moving, I got to see that the 28 Days/Weeks/Years line has not squandered its renewed lease of life.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a good resolution to the cliff-hangers established by 28 Years Later, way back in 2025. The former was about build-up, about establishing a world, introducing the order of things, in a plague-infested Britain abandoned by the international community, making sure we knew where we stood, and putting the pieces in place for later payoffs. The latter is that payoff, and clearly someone felt that fans who had waited all those years for the return of a 28 Anythings Later deserved that abundant payoff sooner, rather than later. After the calm, the storm; after the famine, the feast.
With all the pieces in place from the first chapter, The Bone Temple sees Nia DaCosta and her own team take the reigns for part two – with only Garland remaining to script. Meanwhile long term DaCosta-collaborators Sean Bobbitt came in for cinematography, and Hildur Guðnadóttir provided the score; replacing Boyle-regulars Anthony Dod Mantle and Young Fathers respectively.
These shifts give the film a feel that immediately lets you know this will not be more of the same – and that has always been the strength of this story. The 28 films remain a joy to watch in part because – while a few key core themes run through each – they are eternally reinventing themselves, and finding ways to surprise or confound our expectations.
Most of the first outing’s huge vistas of a desolate and rewilded England are gone. Instead, Bobbitt’s claustrophobic close-ups allow the returning cast members (in particular Ralph Fiennes) to tell huge sections of the story with subtle facial expressions – and for the story of an English doctor who even in the midst of a cataclysmic pandemic, refuses to abandon his bedside manner, that adds a whole new dimension to every interaction. At the same time, this cues us to expect that this will be a story very different in scope: less concerned with the world which has already been built for it (and is presumably still fresh in the memory of fans for them to forego a reminder); and instead focused on a smaller, personal story.
As to spoilers, I will try and keep them to a minimum – but in order to talk about this film’s themes, there will still be details some of you may want to avoid until you have seen it. And I do recommend that you see it.
We are the walking dead
Within the established 28 environment, the more intimate scope of The Bone Temple takes on the format of a folk-tale, in which Doctor Kelson (Fiennes) befriends Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) – the local Alpha, who leads a pack of infected in the nearby woodland. Channelling his inner Androcles, Kelson sedates the colossal figure charging angrily toward him, to remove two arrows someone has lodged in Samson’s torso.
As their relationship progresses, Garland’s script takes the chance to once again evolve the lore around the infected of the 28 series. As Samson makes a habit of visiting Kelson, apparently drawn by the peace the doctor’s sedatives bring to his mind and body, the physician begins to treat him as a patient, eventually striking on the realisation that those with the rage virus, reviled (and finally even referred to as “zombies” by another character) are not what they seem. They are not dead, they are not irredeemable, they are still human – still us.
In mainstream culture, the ‘zombie’ – the infected, the undead, whatever you call them – often still serves as ideological shorthand for ruling class fears of mass insurrection: the end of capitalism understood as the end of the world. In the 28 series, however, they are more often the consequence of that elite trying to cling to power, to maintain control of their diseased little island at all costs. In Days, the rage virus is engineered by scientists seeking an antidote to social upheaval – as hinted at by the various screens playing protest footage at the facility. In Weeks, US military occupation causes a second, final outbreak by trying to repopulate London too quickly, for the sake of ‘getting back to normal’. In Years, Spike finds he is ill-equipped to survive on the mainland, as his community’s training hinges entirely on the bland English nationalism which failed to defend the island in the first place, due to its centring on guarding the arbitrary ideas of an elite, rather than actual human beings.
In each case, the series also makes it plain that even in a world where ‘people’ and ‘infected’ exist, those clinging to power might demonise or disparage the latter – but they regard both with contempt. The British soldiers in Days see survivors as breeding stock, and if they are unwilling then they are to be killed and burned alongside the infected. The US troops in Weeks eventually begin treating everyone as legitimate a target when it becomes clear they have lost control of London. And in Years, a hapless Nato soldier attempts to shoot a baby born to an infected parent, even when it becomes clear she is clear of the virus.
The Bone Temple sees this theme finally comes full-circle with Samson, a character who we have been trained to revile – but who we spend much of this film having to learn to trust and empathise with. We are almost learning to rehumanise that powerful part in ourselves, which disengages our atomised, miserable status-quo – a world which, as Kelson notes seemed so inevitable, and untouchable, until it wasn’t anymore. And maybe the monsters are not the ones who brought about that end – but the ones who pine for a return to order.
That’s where a second strand to the folk-tale kicks in – and a story unfolds in which the leader of a Satanic cult mistakes Kelson (daubed in red iodine solution to prevent infection; and surrounded by skulls he has assembled as a memorial to life, death and the human experience) for the Devil himself. Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (who you may remember, styles himself and his acolytes like Jimmy Savile) is another individual looking to demonise the mass upheaval – literally claiming that the infected are symptoms of a Satanic apocalypse – while inflicting cruel and lethal violence on healthy and infected people alike.
It’s a thrilling and tense story, which also yields some decent scares along the way. Not least, a nightmarish moment in which we consider what it would be like to be an infected, who suddenly regains his humanity while in the middle of the pack, in a darkening forest.
But…
That’s all very well. For me, though, there are four major issues to The Bone Temple, which mean that while I am happy to say I liked it, I didn’t love it.
The first of those is that its original score is a complete non-entity. Considering the emphatic success of Young Fathers’ OST for the previous outing, that is a noticeable climb-down. That album (which may have been top of my Spotify all year) left its fingerprints on the whole story – and while I have heard it said often that the best sound work is the kind you don’t actually notice, Guðnadóttir’s replacement score here takes this to such an absurd end that it becomes functionally anonymous. Either fading entirely from the picture, or piping up over the dialogue to deliver something so utterly banal, that it manages to add no emotional impact whatsoever. The Bone Temple might as well be a film without music – besides the 80s nostalgia that Kelson’s wind-up record-player frequently delivers.
It is not the only issue related to sound. The sound design Brendan Feeney and Johnnie Burn delivered in the first part was stunning – with the tortured screams which reverberate around the English countryside after dark serving as a constant reminder that our characters are never safe – but the pair were not used for the sequel – and the five-person sound design team in The Bone Temple don’t create even half the atmosphere this time out. This feeds into my second big non-plus about the film, though.
The Bone Temple has had a world set up for it to utilise, it doesn’t need to build anything. But it uses so little of what has been provided – from the sounds of the endless agonies and terrors of the night, to the natural world dynamics which left us feeling that our protagonists were never far from danger. Heartfelt conversations and emotional development occurred, but never separated from the nightmarish backdrop they took place in. But while every tearful reminiscence there was accompanied by us scanning the horizon for figures, or listening for the caw of a crow, everything Kelson, and Jimmy do in their respective arcs feels like it takes place in a bubble. There is no peripheral threat, no anxiety or unrest at play – everything is just straight in front of us, and that is a missed opportunity, even if you want to tell a smaller, more personal story.
The characterisation of many members of the cast is also lacking – and considering we spend a great deal of time with some of them, that is not ideal. While Kelson and Samson do get enough alone time that we genuinely begin to feel for them by the film’s final act, nothing else comes close to replacing the emotional core of Spike and Isla in the first part. For a species which defines itself by the stories we tell each other, nobody seems to have anything much to say about their experiences, besides the doctor, and the cult leader. Many other characters seem to have been cut down to the barest of bones, in a way that leaves them feeling either under-used, or blatantly invented to be killed off – something which has never felt so cynical in previous editions.
Then there’s my fourth note; and perhaps the biggest issue I had with The Bone Temple. That comes when you put all this together. In stark contrast to the first Years film, where Boyle and Garland swung for the fences, this comes across as a slightly timid affair. Far from the feverish heights of the first, which had introduced the hallucinatory hallmarks of Trainspotting and 127 Hours to proceedings, The Bone Temple’s editing is conventional to a fault. Its soundtrack is unwilling to offer anything but the most banal of cello tones to any given scenario. And its use of the environment shies away from many of the most inventive additions Boyle and Garland made to the ‘zombie’ genre six months ago.
Where now?
With all this being said, not every film in a sequence needs to hit the same beats or heights. You need a shift in pace and rhythm, to make peaks and troughs which emphasise those high points – and this 28 revival has always been planned as a trilogy. And the fact that I could still sit through both parts consecutively, topping four hours, and still feel the need to see more, shows how good both parts were in their own ways; stronger, perhaps, for that diversity. Meanwhile, the next part – if (pray to God, Old Nick or Kelson) it happens – is set to end on a creative and emotional high, as Spike – and the original Jim – potentially see their arcs complete together.
Nia DaCosta has been a safe pair of hands for this gig – presumably that’s what landed her the job of directing here. She has overseen a serviceable, bloody and momentarily haunting payoff to an intricate set-up, and left the series in a solid position, where it seems all but certain there will be a third and final Years movie with Boyle returning to direct (although with this franchise, never count on that until you are in the cinema).
Still, it does bemuse me slightly that the critics have been raving about this outing as an improvement on the last. Yes, Ralph Fiennes is great – but he honestly may be the best actor of his generation; he’s great in everything, including the previous film. Yes, the story is more ‘focused’ this time, but only because it has had all the heavy lifting done for it (and The Bone Temple could never work as a standalone film in the same way 28 Years Later could).
Looking beyond that, the more straightforward delivery, a lack of a ‘divisive’ ending, and the fact that the impotent delusion of English nationalism is less the focus of this outing, may all be behind the critical love-in. Or then again, maybe they’re just fans desperate as I am for this story to roll on, and to enjoy one last hurrah – where Cillian Murphy’s character of Jim comes full-circle, and returns as an older surrogate parent, in the series’ continued treatise on fatherhood. If the inflated praise of the critical mainstream puts enough bums in seats, that becomes more likely. Disproportionate or not, I suppose I’m all for that.