The second part of a planned trilogy, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, from director Nia DaCosta and screenwriter Alex Garland, arrives hot on the heels of its predecessor, 28 Years Later, forgoing the customary leap forward in time to stay settled-in with the cast of characters that were introduced in this previous instalment. We are, very briefly, presented with a small, croft settlement of brand new survivors at one point but these creeping foragers scarcely amount to much more than superficially detailed victims for Jack O'Connell's devil-worshipping Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, and his mob of track-suited tearaways, to brutalise. The Bone Temple then isn't particularly interested in these kinds of perspectives - the barely sketched people who allow the filmmakers to burn minutes in repose while offering up a repetitive sense of discovery. And why would you be, when you have Ralph Fiennes on call as the iodine-stained Dr. Kelson?
The interlaced inferno of 28 Days Later flash froze a specific moment of post-millennium anxiety, one that prodded at that era's mounting sense of horror that the endless prosperity predicted in the 1990s might not, actually, materialise. That, in actual fact, the human race was becoming unstuck and reverting back to patterns of behaviour that are more outwardly violent and base. The rage virus that galloped through these British isles brought that country to a screeching halt, trapping its surviving citizens inside a pantomime performance anchored to the thoughts and feeling of a receding century. The United Kingdom was, essentially, pickled. So, not only does O'Connells' cult leader behave like some nightmarish recollection of a disgraced light entertainment personality but cottage-dwelling fathers dote on their children, singing lullabies about a world in which fascism has, definitively, been vanquished forever. Their world may have collapsed in on itself but, barring any contradictory transmissions beamed in from the outside world, somehow the UK's immolation seems to have righted the sinking ship that we, in reality, have all found ourselves on.
These strange, nostalgic pangs for the comfort and certainty promised by history's end extends to the aforementioned GP, a job role that is itself now a deliberately diminished position within modern, British communities. Kelson, unburdened by the slashed funding of austerity or orders to direct the sick and needy to privatised care, is patient and delicate in his dealings with the damaged people that come before him. He sits with them and listens, getting to know them and tailoring his therapies to the individual rather than fobbing them off with a one-size-fits-all treatment path. His serene, non-judgmental demeanor is itself a potent tonic; enough to dispel all manner of simmering anger. Unusually then, Bone Temple rejects any of the fantastical underpinnings of this specific zombie virus to examine how a valorous doctor might attempt to provide treatment for such unapologetic, mutative violence. Danny Boyle's first instalment may have ended on the promise of bewigged nutters somersaulting over the camera in a Super Sentai flurry - a mode of action that, funnily enough, the much younger DaCosta has no interest in replicating here - but this Bone Temple is instead a sort of inverse of Aleksei German's Hard to be a God. Specifically, a film premised on the idea that a knowledgeable man steeped in (now) deeply foreign art and technologies can be a force for radical change in this sunken world.
