This story contains major spoilers for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.
When you watch movies professionally, you aren’t always privy to spontaneous bursts of audience enthusiasm. (This is a fair and just punishment for the privilege of watching movies professionally.) I didn’t see anyone in a state of pure rapturous glee over all those superheroes coming through the portals at climax of Avengers: Endgame and I didn’t see young people losing their minds and/or popcorn during the “chicken jockey†bit in A Minecraft Movie. I watched those films at press screenings, where the response of a crowd—even an enthusiastic one that’s sometimes been larded with influencers or recruited seat-fillers—is typically tempered by a sense of professional decorum. (Or depression.) So it was startling and delightful when a scene about three-quarters of the way through 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple was met with sustained applause at the Manhattan press screening. Checking my social feeds later, I learned this was not a one-off phenomenon. Across the country, sometimes-jaded critics were being moved to audible displays of appreciation for a particular aspect of Ralph Fiennes’ performance —and not his impressively casual full-frontal nudity, either.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a follow-up to last summer’s long-aborning zombie sequel 28 Years Later, which returned to a quarantined Britain nearly three decades after the zombie-virus outbreak depicted in 2002’s 28 Days Later. The Bone Temple, by contrast, picks up mere days after that, following two story threads. In one, young hero Spike (Alfie Williams) is conscripted into a roving Satanist gang led by a homicidal maniac calling himself Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell). In the other, Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), the solitary keeper of the “bone temple†monument introduced in the previous film, forms an unlikely bond with an “alpha†zombie (Chi Lewis-Parry) and begins to believe the virus may be treatable. The threads are drawn together when Jimmy meets with Dr. Kelson. His gang believes him to be “Old Nick,†the Satan figure from whom Jimmy (in reality a power-hungry charlatan) claims to receive marching orders. After a long, uneasy, sometimes unnervingly funny conversation, Jimmy informs Kelson that he must pretend to be Old Nick in front of the others, affirming Jimmy’s power and glory, or else he will gruesomely murder him.
Dr. Kelson, who we have seen spinning records throughout the film to soundtrack his zombie bonding, takes to the task with self-preserving gusto. When Jimmy brings his gang (including Spike, who has kept mum about Kelson’s identity) for a nighttime audience with Old Nick, Kelson—and, as such, Fiennes—puts on a tremendous show. Pulling an Iron Maiden record from his personal collection, Kelson blasts “The Number of the Beast,†lip-syncing to the song in dark-eyed makeup while dancing madly and setting off a rock-show-worthy series of pyrotechnics (and blowing hallucinogenic drugs into the gang’s faces). The image depicted on the Bone Temple poster, which looks like Fiennes crying out in madness and/or agony and/or zombiefication, is actually from this sequence. That only adds to the thrill of deception; though the applause at the end of the performance is probably attributable to watching an actor as finely calibrated as Fiennes commit so thoroughly to putting on a quasi-Satanic rock-out, there’s also a kind of medicine-show zeal to him explicitly faking his way through staged horrors in a movie containing plenty of genuinely disturbing sights.
In fact, having Kelson attempt to defuse the Jimmy situation through force of show (rather than show of force) weaves together the torture-slasher brutality we’ve seen from Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal with the unguarded gentility we’ve seen from Kelson. He has spent much of the movie in quiet contemplation and experimentation, soothing the alpha zombie with a cocktail of morphine, understanding, and Duran Duran. The Bone Temple provides the merest glimpses of Kelson’s pre-pandemic life through his words and a few photographs, mirrored in the brief memories of the alpha zombie (this probably isn’t the first movie to give a zombie its own POV flashback, but it feels like a pretty novel idea). The idea that he could pull off a grand, life-saving deception with a particularly majestic re-staging of Satanic Panic is, beneath the surface, a wistful expression of memory. He’s reviving a piece of his old world with its renewed ability to shock and awe in a dismantled society. He then uses that power not to build up Jimmy, but to save Spike from the man’s clutches, at great cost to himself.
Presentationally, the panache of the Iron Maiden sequence feels like vintage Danny Boyle, who directed 28 Days Later and 28 Years Later, and is one of the few directors with a music-video sensibility that feels more formally connected to the craft of an old-fashioned musical. He’s never made a proper one (and the closest he’s come, the Beatles-centric Yesterday, is probably his worst movie), but he has enough great music scenes to fill one: Put together the “Beyond the Sea†number from A Life Less Ordinary, the Beatles recording session from Yesterday, the finale from Slumdog Millionaire, and any number of scenes from Trainspotting, and you’ve got a better musical than Rob Marshall has ever managed.
Strange and kind of lovely, then, that it’s not even Boyle directing The Bone Temple, but Nia DaCosta, who also had a movie out last year: Hedda, a reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler with her regular collaborator Tessa Thompson. DaCosta also directed the ill-regarded (but very fun!) superhero movie The Marvels; a 2021 legacy sequel to Candyman; and the townie noir Little Woods. So far, her eclecticism recalls Boyle’s career, though her style in The Bone Temple is more restrained than the multi-iPhone virtuosity of its Boyle-directed predecessor.
Nonetheless, there are moments of showmanship in DaCosta’s past work that connect to this scene. In The Marvels, Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) and her compatriots travel to a whimsical planet whose denizens communicate entirely in song, leading to a swaying, swooping little negotiation scene between the lead hero and the planet’s prince. As in Bone Temple, DaCosta communicates urgency through song in a way that feels classically musical (even though The Marvels, in a display of the studio-assisted choppiness that sometimes undermines its aims, abruptly curtails its song and dance, as if it’s worried about what the internet will say.) In The Bone Temple, DaCosta earns her applause by letting the song play out so thoroughly. There’s a similarly firm showiness to the way DaCosta wields the camera in Hedda, determined to let Thompson’s title character, not the constraints of a stage, steer the physical action. As with her zombie music break, the result is openly theatrical without sacrificing its cinematic dimensions.
So despite its compatibility with past Boyle movies, the Iron Maiden sequence is also when DaCosta manages to make the movie her own; it’s what the movie’s mix of dry humor (from Fiennes) and darkly funny villainy (from O’Connor) builds to unexpectedly. It may even partially redeem the way The Bone Temple feels a little smaller in scope than its predecessor, circling back to locations already visited in that film. The elegiac monument in the previous film is revisited as Kelson’s staging area for his triumphant performance, where faking some great yet knowable evil provides some kind of mysterious outlet for his fading memories of a life that can’t return (something literalized when Jimmy deals him a fatal wound in response to his Spike-saving pivot). He’s coerced into the act in the first place, but he sure didn’t have to go this hard. How can we do anything but applaud?