28 Years Later: The Bone Temple: the zombie franchise rolls on, fuelled by blood, guts and Duran Duran

After the abundantly strange 28 Years Later, this is a conventional franchise instalment: fourth, third or second (in a proposed trilogy), depending on your point of view, it continues, concludes and sets up, without being entirely satisfactory on its own account. The ‘actual’ second 28 Days Later film, 28 Weeks Later (2007), has been semi-disowned because of the non-involvement of director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland, authors of the 2002 original (hence the possibility of counting Bone Temple as the third film); but that film had the virtue of opening up the franchise’s world in a way that Bone Temple does not. Shot back-to-back with its immediate predecessor, with Nia DaCosta taking over from Boyle as director, it uses the same or similar locations – the bone temple itself, as well as the train and various other Northumbrian sites not markedly different from the ones we saw last year – but not Lindisfarne, so that the effect is of contraction rather than expansion.

We pick up where we left off, with young Spike (Alfie Williams) being inducted into a gang of tracksuited, bewigged survivors all called Jimmy, led by the dangerously charismatic Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), rapidly revealed as the film’s villain. Obviously though not explicitly styled on Jimmy Savile, he is also a satanist, and so the Jimmies spend their time not foraging for food or building defences – or making children’s wishes come true – but killing other survivors with extreme sadism. Zombies, in general, take a back seat; but one, an ‘Alpha’ (big zombie) dubbed Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), becomes a central character over on the film’s parallel track, which resumes the tale of Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), the eccentric GP who euthanised Spike’s mother in the earlier film and added her boiled-clean bones to his growing temple. In that film he was shown sedating Samson; over the course of this one he tames him. Ultimately, the two narrative lines meet, whereupon O’Connell winningly states the premise out loud: “So I’m a satanist and you’re an atheist.”

The ‘Jimmies’ arc is misjudged: zombies tearing people’s heads off for entertainment is one thing, prolonged graphic human-on-human torture another. Moreover, the Jimmy Savile bit and the Jimmies’ frequent references to Teletubbies (1997-2001) are reminiscent of bad stand-up comedy, coasting on shared recognition of something naff, and nothing more (and how would these youngsters have known of Savile?). If the idea is that these things are especially revealing of British culture, an idea is all it remains. On the other hand, and at some risk of self-contradiction, Bone Temple’s embrace of another well-worn signifier of Naff Britannia, Duran Duran, apparently Dr Kelson’s favourite band, is practically the film’s highlight. ‘Ordinary World’ on its own would be on the nose, two Duran tracks more promising, but three is inspired.

Dr Kelson was introduced in the previous film as a madman, an impression only somewhat dispelled by the film’s conclusion. After all, notwithstanding his progressive views on assisted dying, Kelson’s main enterprise seems to have been constructing a huge temple out of human bones; indeed, the two things together are what makes his character interesting. In this film, though, there is little doubt about it: Kelson is the embodiment of science, wisdom and, as luck would have it, c. 2002 morality. Fiennes is a delight, playing for laughs his Prospero-and-Caliban relationship with Samson, which culminates deliriously in a dance sequence set to Duran Duran’s ‘Rio’. This is only the first, and the and more understated, of two dance sequences for Fiennes, who is forced by O’Connell to impersonate the Devil himself in order to subdue his restless gang of worshippers.

Even at the end, though, the bone temple is strange. Kelson’s explanation is that it’s a memento mori: remember you must die, it says. In the circumstances, with death around every corner, this brings to mind one of the characters in Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori (1959), whose response, when given the same message by an unknown caller, is “My memory is failing in certain respects. I am gone eighty-six. But somehow I do not forget my death, whenever that will be.” Of course, the injunction means more than this; it is meant to condition how we act, and (as in Spark’s novel) it is not easily separable from the Christian tradition. For Kelson, however, building the temple is an act of sweet atheist reason, without superstitious associations, and the film seems to take his side; but perhaps the sheer macabre excess of the bone temple tells its own discordant story.

 ► 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is in UK cinemas now.