In my experience, there were two kinds of people who saw Danny Boyle’s “28 Years Later” last year: People who were confused by the ending, and people who picked up what Danny Boyle and Alex Garland were laying down and found it shocking. It was difficult to discuss the ending for a while — if only because, in “spoiler culture,” that’s a faux pas — but Nia DaCosta’s excellent sequel, “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple,” assumes you saw the previous film and picks up right where Boyle left off. So let’s run this down.
“28 Years Later” concluded with Spike (Alfie Williams), alone in the zombified English countryside, meeting a gang of young, ultraviolent weirdos in track suits and blond wigs, led by a cult leader named Jimmy (Jack O’Connell). If you didn’t get the reference — and don’t feel bad, quite a few Americans didn’t — this “Jimmy” is inspired by Jimmy Savile, a British celebrity who was known for his philanthropic work with children and the elderly before his death in 2011, after which hundreds of sexual abuse allegations came to light, many of which had been dismissed in his lifetime. I repeat: Hundreds. So if you didn’t know before, let’s make it clear: Modeling a villain in a horror movie after this real-life monster was a disturbing and controversial decision.
Also, since it comes up multiple times in “The Bone Temple,” it’s worth remembering that these films take place in an alternate reality that diverted in 2002. So anything that happened after “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” either didn’t happen in this world, or happened very differently. So the film doesn’t comment directly on Savile’s crimes. Instead, “The Bone Temple” assumes the audience will make the association for ourselves. And since this fictional “Jimmy” runs his own religion — and since this new film is about the failure of religion to save our souls — you can see how much heavy s–t is on Nia DaCosta and Alex Garland’s minds.
“28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” finds Spike forcefully dragged into Jimmy’s cult, a Satanic organization whose leader claims to be the son of Old Nick (Satan, to us Americans). The Jimmies travel the country spreading violence and torture, in the name of charity. Spike wants no part of it but he’s outnumbered and unable to flee. He’s just trying to survive without doing anything too despicable, and that’s not easy. Eventually he’ll have to choose between human decency or Jimmy’s wicked dogma.
Meanwhile, in the actual “Bone Temple,” Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) develops an odd relationship with Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), an infected “Alpha” zombie who has mutated into an enormous size. Kelson was sedating Samson with morphine whenever the creature attacked, but Samson is now addicted to the substance, so he’s coming to the bone temple just to get his fix … which changes the dynamic between the living and the infected in very odd ways.
Boyle’s “28 Years Later” suggested that there may be more to zombies than we always assumed, and DaCosta’s sequel is dead set on exploring this idea. Kelson’s compassion and understanding, rooted in scientific and philosophical education, already made him a messiah figure to Spike. But, as you can imagine, the two storylines in “The Bone Temple” are destined to converge, and the film’s representative of religion, the malevolent Jimmy, is destined to confront the good doctor. And the filmmakers are destined to declare a victor.
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“28 Years Later” was an epic horror film that traveled far and wide, revealing vast swaths of its post-apocalyptic world. “The Bone Temple” narrows the focus to a few characters and locales. It’s intimate in scale, but gigantic in its implications. This is a biblical battle between good and evil, in which goodness takes the form of science and reason, which according to DaCosta’s film can cure humanity of its greatest delusions: mindless rage and mindless fanaticism.
But fittingly, “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” never feels preachy. Blunt, certainly, but not preachy. It’s too dramatically fascinating to be a simple screed. Jack O’Connell and Ralph Fiennes play intriguingly complicated figureheads, and Erin Kellyman — playing “Jimmy Ink,” a true believer in Jimmy’s Satanic cause — finds intriguing insights in a character who, in many other stories, probably would have been a mindless follower. Even Samson the Alpha Zombie gets moments of depth. He’s a little like Bub from George A. Romero’s “Day of the Dead,” if Bub were tripping balls (and the size of a Buick). And in the middle of it is Alfie Williams, still playing Spike as a young man in search of a father figure who won’t let him down.
Danny Boyle’s “28 Years Later” was about redefining the British national identity, not just in this grotesque “Sliding Doors” version of contemporary British society, but in the real one as well. Nia DaCosta’s smart, freaky sequel zooms in on the ongoing battle between sense and senselessness until it finds strong, connective tissue between science and religion. These are both, the film declares, a pursuit of deeper meaning. But this is a horror movie, so one of them is horrifying, and the relationship cannot end in handshakes and hugs. “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” has to end like it begins, in fear and death, and with uncomfortable questions about who we are and where we’re going now.
“28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” hits U.K. theaters on Wednesday, followed by its U.S. rollout on Friday.
