More wild, weird dystopian horror

  

 I admired 2025's 28 Years Later, a vividly realized foray into dystopian horror from director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland. Director Nia DaCosta takes the reins for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, a continuation of the unsettling story Boyle effectively told.

   Sorrowful and keenly attuned to issues of mortality, 28 Years Later introduced Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), an isolated physician who built a bone temple from skulls as a memorial to those taken by ravenous, growling zombies who arrived thanks to the spread of the horrible Rage Virus.

     The first movie, an extension of 28 Days Later (2008), revolved around 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams), a kid who was learning how to hunt zombies outside one of many heavily protected "safe zones."

      Bone Temple begins with young Spike’s induction into the gang that rescued him from a zombie swarm at the end of the last chapter. Williams' Spike quickly learns that gang leader Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) is no savior; he’s a Satan-worshiping sadist who leads seven followers intent on torturing and killing everyone they encounter.

      If Earth has become hell, it's no wonder someone has emerged to do the devil's bidding.

     The plot eventually brings Jimmy and his followers into Dr. Kelson’s orbit. More on that later.

    More gory and graphic than the previous movie, Bone Temple leans heavily into its violence, including a sequence in which the gang invades the home of settlers and stages an assault that may bring the tortures of Texas Chain Saw Massacre to mind. Da Costa (Candyman) establishes a no-mercy approach to the bloody horrors inflicted by the Jimmys.

     For the record, Crystal ignores real names, calling everyone in his group "Jimmy."

     As the leader of the ruthless Jimmys, O’Connor gives an intensely gripping performance. Intelligent as he is twisted, Crystal radiates charismatic menace. Evil intentions and cleverness make him scarier than any zombie. 

    Meanwhile, Dr. Kelson tries to subdue an imposing Alpha zombie (Chi Lewis-Parry). Refusing to kill, Kelson hopes to demonstrate that the creature he dubs "Samson" can be dissuaded from ripping the heads off others and munching on their brains. 

   Kelson hooks Samson on morphine as he tries to develop a drug that will prevent the infected giant from killing without remorse. 

   Whacky as all this sounds, the budding relationship between Samson and Kelson provides some welcome tenderness, even a bit of eloquence.

     The screenplay by Boyle and Garland also finds dissension within the Jimmy ranks. Erin Kellyman portrays Jimmy Ink, a youngster who befriends Spike. She doubts the authenticity of Crystal's  claim to be the son of Satan. 

    It’s difficult to describe the movie’s most riveting, over-the-top sequence without spoilers. DaCosta puts on one hell of a show with what might be called a "bizarre production number." A substantial portion of a preview audience applauded the sequence's twisted comic energy, which is abetted by Fiennes, who serves up a display so crazed, it's difficult not to chuckle. Hildur Guonadottir's score deserves credit, as well.

    I don’t think Bone Temple, the second in a proposed trilogy, matches its predecessor, but it stands as a wild and weird sequel that holds its own, providing you like your horror served with a helping of gore.

A strange, haunting '28 Years Later'

 

  Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland return to a series they began in 2002 when they surprised audiences with 28 Days Later, a zombie movie that thrust Cillian Murphy into a post-apocalyptic dystopia. 

  That movie was followed in 2007 by 28 Weeks Later, another helping of post-apocalyptic horror with director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo in charge of a cast that included Robert Carlyle, Jeremy Renner, and Rose Byrne.

   28 Years Later begins as series fans might expect. Put another way,  the projectile vomiting of blood begins within the first eight minutes. And, yes, there are severed heads with spinal cords still attached, not to mention fast-moving zombies and the horribly infectious Rage Virus that turns people into flesh eaters.

   But Boyle doesn't wait long to let us know that the movie will be an exercise in unhinged weirdness, setting his story on Holy Island off the English coast. The mainland -- reachable by crossing a strip of land that's only available during low tide -- is populated by infectious zombies who have been kept off the island.

    Twelve-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) becomes the movie's central character after being introduced to zombie hunting by his father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who takes him to the mainland for his first kill. Spike's initiation into manhood reveals that he can be queasy about killing -- which, in this diminished world, is accomplished with bows and arrows.  

   Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle gives the forests and the sea a feeling of end-times emptiness, and Boyle makes effectively eerie use of a recording of Rudyard Kipling's poem, Boots. The movie's sound design by Johnnie Byrne and a score by an Edinburgh group called Young Fathers further suggest dread and perhaps even hopelessness.

   Jodie Comer plays a pivotal role as Spike's confused, bedridden mom. After returning from his first hunt, Spike learns that a doctor (perhaps the last one on earth) lives on  the mainland where he's noted for tending a fire in which he burns an abundant supply of corpses.

   Spike asks his mom to accompany him to the mainland in hopes that the doctor can cure the malady that seems to be killing her. En route to the doctor's camp, the two meet Erik (Edvin Ryding), a stranded Swedish soldier who joins them for a while. Mom also helps an infected woman deliver a baby who's born virus-free.

    Almost nothing feels normal in this tense, corrupted world, but the movie saves its most bizarre flourish for the moment when Ralph Fiennes appears as Dr. Kelson. Kelson coats himself with iodine to ward off the infected. 

   Looking as if he might have wandered in from the set of a Road Warrior movie or perhaps from the jungles of Apocalypse Now, Fiennes radiates an angelic benevolence  that elevates the movie and makes it clear that although  there are many ways to die, no one escapes. His motto: Memento mori, remember you must die.

    A linked prologue and epilogue provide violent punches  that remind us that we are, after all, watching a zombie movie. But Boyle and Garland approach mortality seriously, and 28 Years Later emerges as a piece of horror that speaks in a distinctive, haunting voice that one hopes will carry into two additional movies, one of them slated to be released early next year.