The Bone Temple review – a trivial but entertaining series diversion – The Irish Times

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

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Director: Nia DaCosta

Cert: 16

Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Jack O’Connell, Alfie Williams, Erin Kellyman, Chi Lewis-Parry, Emma Laird, Louis Ashbourne Serkis, Maura Bird

Running Time: 1 hr 49 mins

Where to go after the epic blend of folk horror and state-of-the-nation satire that was 28 Years Later?

If Danny Boyle’s threequel to his groundbreaking 28 Days Later had a flaw – and it probably didn’t – it concerned an excess of ambition. The 2025 film combined commentary on Brexit with a wider consideration of English isolationism that took in a montage to Rudyard Kipling’s Boots. (And plenty of brain eating, obviously.)

Nia DaCosta’s Bone Temple is a tighter, more shamelessly horrid affair that is most notable for an eventual circle back to concerns of the 2002 original.

Last year we left young Spike (Alfie Williams) in the worrying care of a dubious gang led by the creatively demented Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell). There was some furrowing of brows when, after absorbing Crystal’s appearance in the dying minutes of that film, cinemagoers clocked that his cadre took queasy inspiration from the disgraced DJ Jimmy Savile.

You won’t need to be told that, decades earlier, a virus turned much of the British population into slavering zombies and sent the rest into dystopian hibernation. The Jimmys make their way about the blasted territories of northern England in yellow wigs and clattering chains. Their repeated chant of “Howzat?” references Savile’s now chilling “How’s about that then?” (also the title of the serial sex abuser’s authorised biography).

There is a half-serious point being made here about the distorting effects of unreliable nostalgia. The virus arrived when Savile’s crimes were the stuff of schoolyard rumour rather than devastating personal testimony. But all that is in deep background. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that, their mythology greatly elaborated from that brief coda in the previous film, the Jimmys are largely here to generate dubious unease.

This fourth episode – sometimes straying into torture porn – is the most gratuitously nasty of the series so far. Early on, a knife fight ends with blood fountaining from a femoral artery. An inverted crucifixion played out to key lines from the Gospel of St Matthew may once have generated protests but is now more likely to trigger weary rolling of eyes. It’s as disgracefully diverting as it is silly.

The nugget of plot here has Sir Lord Jimmy, now with Spike as reluctant disciple, deciding that Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), the benign Kurtz encountered last time among a towering human ossuary, is the earthly embodiment of Satan.

We know that, for all his apparently bloodied, half-naked appearance (actually the result of smeared iodine), the former GP is an amiable humanist dedicated to honouring the once-possessed dead.

Fiennes has enormous fun here. Before the baddies arrive, he summons up youth by humming along to the greatest hits of Duran Duran. The extravagant musical set piece he stages to mollify the arriving maniacs risks pushing us into irredeemable absurdity, but only the most committed grinches will prove resistant to Fiennes’ back-breaking efforts. In his golden years, that great actor is proving to be the most irresistible of good sports.

Something has, however, been lost since 28 Years Later. That may, as is often the case, be the consequence of a holding-pattern strategy taking over the second part of a trilogy. These two films and their incoming successor are being set up on their own semi-autonomous narrative arc.

Part one sweated to establish a Britain mired in fantastic decay that echoed developments in the real world. The new film, evocatively shot by Sean Bobbitt, feels like a trivial, if entertaining, diversion on the way to a more substantial closing fall.

Most 28 Days Later enthusiasts will have already guessed who will be accompanying us through that conclusion. They rest of you may wish to avoid more detailed cast lists.

In cinemas from Wednesday, January 14th