Last June's 28 Years Later was probably as close to a stealth event movie as the current marketplace could allow. Few cinemagoers would have entered with elevated expectations, given the near two-decade gap that followed 2007's 28 Weeks Later, yet director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland collectively pushed further than anticipated, both in their parable of parenting in a country beset by monsters and in an ending that very much went there. Feathers were ruffled; jaws dropped. Was this Garland the edgelord-adjacent sometime gamer broaching a taboo subject for lolz and attention, or merely the first phase in a more considered reappropriation of recent British popular culture? Just by floating that question, the creatives involved have raised expectation levels around the sequel: if you're anything like this viewer, you'll want to know how 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple - shot back-to-back with the first film, this time with Nia DaCosta (of the Candyman reboot and last year's Hedda) behind the camera - intends to handle this potential hospital pass, with its vague whiff of bad taste. Certainly those monsters are still in play as the new film begins, and by monsters I mean both the Jimmies, the tracksuit-clad, bewigged gang our teenage hero Spike (Alfie Williams) fell in with at the end of film one, and the franchise's ever-enraged zombies, begrimed representatives of a civilisation stripped bare and reduced to the old primal urges. Yet Garland and DaCosta also set out on a search for renewed humanity here, what Ralph Fiennes' former NHS doctor Ian Kelson - more prominent this time around, bringing out the dead while simultaneously trying to tame the zombie hordes - frames as "peace and respite". God, do you remember those?
Both formally and ideologically, this is a simpler film than its predecessor, made up of two strands that intersect in a final showdown between something like good and something like evil. Whenever matters get too intense around the Jimmies - led by Jack O'Connell's Lord Sir Jimmy Crystal on a plundering rampage through the English countryside - DaCosta and Garland can always cut away to the dutiful Kelson and his pet project. The tactic may just win back those who felt Boyle's film, with its staccato camera trickery and headspinning soundtrack cues, was all a bit too much. (By contrast, we know exactly where we are with DaCosta's needledrops: Duran Duran, Radiohead, Iron Maiden, plus a final cue setting up a further film that may serve as a homecoming of sorts.) Humanity, however, demands we embrace the eccentric and idiosyncratic, and DaCosta's remit has clearly been to not just protect and sustain but expand upon this series' warped mythos. So we get the usual zombie attacks, decapitations and eviscerations; the surviving humans are becoming fewer and farther between film by film, numerically limiting possible expressions of fellowship. But we also get a scene, quite early on, where Fiennes' Kelson can be seen teaching zombie alpha Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) to dance to the strains of Duran Duran's "Ordinary World". This embrace of the other counts double when set against the self-serving Jimmies, revealed in the course of the film as pure Reform UK: a pyramid scheme or other passing fad for those who've responded to the carnage of the 21st century with misremembered, misapplied nostalgia - or some desperate need to belong. At best, they're a roaming Facebook group called something like Better Days or Simpler Times; at their worst, they're a murderous personality cult with especially bad teeth. Garland and DaCosta view them as disruptors in the sense the locals in Straw Dogs or the January 6th rioters were disruptors: opportunistic foxes impelled to storm the collective henhouse. You wouldn't, and shouldn't, trust your children with them.
Around them, two things quickly become apparent. One, that DaCosta has been given far greater encouragement by her producers to go for it than she ever received in the making of her striking yet visibly bowdlerised Candyman: the new film still lands among us with an 18 certificate, and the BBFC in its current iteration tends not to give those ratings away like sweeties. Two, that Fiennes - rejoined at the nothing-to-lose, no-fucks-given stage of his career, where he's likely to take a gamble on this as he is to do the cosy new Alan Bennett - knows exactly what he's doing and how to play this particular role. (This may, in fact, be the current awards season's foremost instance of an actor understanding the assignment.) His character still looks like Brando's Colonel Kurtz - shaven of head, daubed in orangey iodine that gives him the appearance of blood on his hands (and elsewhere) - but he acts much as an Ian Kelson would: an ordinary man in extraordinary times, doing his best to cling onto his bedside manner in the face of naked barbarism, trying to get his head around that which has been lost and merits commemoration. The central dramatic clash in the new film is really one of memory, about what we remember of the past and how accurately we remember it: when Fiennes talks about the unshakeable foundations of the old world, you feel it deep in your own bones. Dr. Kelson's first encounter with Lord Sir Jimmy is as much gentle analysis and diagnosis as it is confrontation or collision of worldviews: it's a scene I don't think we've seen in a zombie film before. His second is pure theatre, and a scene that has to be seen to be believed. This continues to be a very odd franchise, operating some way beyond the studios' usual parameters, but it's also been unusually consistent in its delivery of imaginative, muscular genre cinema - and a rare example of the movies meeting and reflecting this very odd, often outright berserker moment.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
