In El abrazo de la serpiente (Embrace of the Serpent), there is a scene in which indigenous river guide Karamakate revisits a former Catholic mission/residential school on the banks of the Amazon River. He first visited the place decades earlier, where he tried to teach the boys held captive there about their traditions, saying “Don’t believe their crazy tales about eating the body of their gods.” When he returns, he finds them long after the priest has died and they have devolved into an outright cannibalistic cult that quotes half-remembered bits of Christian scripture to support their current state of being. I wrote about this years ago (and proofread poorly, it seems), but Serpiente is a story about an apocalypse that has already happened, the total destruction of a wide swath of cultures and peoples under the heel of European colonialism. I found myself thinking about it a lot during 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, a movie that one wouldn’t necessarily immediately think of as being in conversation with Serpiente, but which shares a common connection in that it spends a great deal of its runtime following a now-adult practitioner of extreme violence who was only a boy when the world as he knew it came to an end. They’re very different texts (with quite divergent intents), but I couldn’t help seeing something of the cannibalistic former wards of the church from Serpiente in Jack O’Connell’s here, and that enriched for me what was already a pretty great movie, especially for a January release. 

Our protagonist from 28 Years Later, Spike (Alfie Williams) takes more of a backseat role in this sequel. At the end of the last film, we last saw him leave the healthy infant who was born of a woman afflicted with the Rage virus before returning to the British mainland, where he was rescued from a pack of infected by a group of knife-wielding weirdos. As this film opens, we find him in the midst of being inducted into their ranks; “Sir” Jimmy Crystal (O’Connell) is the leader of their gang of seven “fingers,” all re-christened “Jimmy” in his honor. Sir Jimmy lords over the others, who have scarred the space between their eyes with an inverted cross like the one he wears, although we don’t see this forced on Spike when he manages to slay his assigned Jimmy despite his physical disadvantages. Elsewhere, Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) continues his work on his macabre memento mori memorial, the bone temple of the title, while also making the “alpha” infected a subject of study, trying to see if the Rage can be tempered even if it can’t be cured. He names the alpha “Samson” (Chi Lewis-Parry) and realizes that the seemingly mindless monster has become addicted to the drugs in his blow darts, so the two of them essentially start doing recreational morphine together and listening to Kelson’s record collection. When the Jimmies come upon some survivors, most of the fingers torture them slowly while Spike vomits and writhes in emotional agony and Sir Jimmy sends one of his deputies, Jimmy Ink (Erin Kellyman) scouting; she sees Kelson and Samson cavorting from afar and reports back to Sir Jimmy that she’s seen Old Nick, setting up a confrontation between the killers, Kelson, and his pet monster. 

I have one complaint. Williams was given a wide range of emotions to play in the previous film as Spike entered an adulthood that was as alien to him as it was to us. He was sheltered from a changing world and trained to survive, but isolated in a way that meant that his first exposures to the hypocrisies and dishonesty of the adult world made him reject it and instead attempt the impossible and bring his mother to Kelson for treatment. Here, Williams only has one mode: utter, pants-soiling terror at being forced into the service of Sir Jimmy and his psychotic acolytes. This makes total sense narratively within the story that this film is telling, but it also means that Spike has no real arc, which is bizarre since the last time we were all here, he was the main character. Here, he’s static and secondary, as this film features a much larger role for Fiennes and alternates entirely between his activities and those of Jimmy and his fingers. There’s a lot of great stuff to be mined here. Kelson’s treatment of Samson is procedural, sure, but it also allows for some excellent music choices. It’s fascinating to watch a man who’s been isolated among the bones of the dead for so long essentially adopt a zombie onto whom he seems to be projecting a lot of intent and intelligence for no other reason than that he’s been lonely a long time, only for the film to surprise us by having these actions not have been in vain. Sir Jimmy’s self-mythologizing has a lot of flair, and he’s effectively menacing and depraved that the film had me on edge for most of it. I didn’t think anything would top the electricity between him and Kelson in their first scene together, but there that’s followed up by a sequence set to Iron Maiden that I expect to be the most talked-about element of the picture. Overall, however, straying so far from Spike as our central focus necessitated a realignment of the stakes that left me less emotionally invested in this outing. 

Nia DaCosta is in the director’s chair this time around, and although I loved the way that Danny Boyle slipped back into this world effortlessly in 28YL, I had a higher opinion of 28 Weeks Later than the consensus, and that film was likewise helmed by a different creative team. Alex Garland still returned to pen this one, and although there’s a distinct stylistic difference between Boyle and DaCosta, I welcome her stamp on this overall enterprise. The zombies have never really been the point in this franchise, and (Samson excepted) the presence of the Rage-afflicted is the smallest here it has ever been, with the extreme gruesome violence on display here coming at the hands of survivors. The infected and the Jimmies have both lost their humanity, but the former did so because of the Rage, while the latter are monsters of Jimmy’s making. This has been the film series’ driving force for as long as it has existed, that man is always the real monster, going all the way back to Christopher Eccleston in the original 28 Days Later. As such, the film’s conflict is also ideological, with Jimmy and the mythology he has built around himself as Satan’s son and heir to dominion over his demons (the infected) inevitably coming to a head with Kelson’s rational atheism, within which he is able to provide some manner of salvation. That he manages to use Jimmy’s follower’s faith against them in the end is clever and satisfying, and I had a great time with the film overall. 

Where I remain most excited to see this franchise continue to go is in its exploration of the way that a disease-ravaged, isolated Britain has, in the absence of a larger social structure, devolved into a series of cults. Sir Jimmy and his crew are an obvious example, as is Kelson’s non-religious (but creepy) solo project of building his elegy of human bones. It didn’t come up in this film, but the island community from which Spike hails seems to have developed some of its own creepy rituals involving a mask, and I expect that the next film in this franchise will see that community return in some form since they are completely absent from this one. Most intriguingly, Samson’s trophy-like acquisition of human heads with attached spines and the way that he displayed them in the woods also seems like a worshipful action, although deciphering the motivation for this is complicated by revelations from Bone Temple, so we shall see. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond