Director: Nia DaCosta
Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Jack O’Connell, Alfie Williams, Erin Kellyman, Chi Lewis-Parry
Rating: (R16)
★★★★
By AMASIO JUTEL
After his Oz-ian quest in 2025’s 28 Years Later, Spike’s (Alfie Williams) journey through post-apocalypse United Kingdom in The Bone Temple is gnarly, nauseous and surprisingly theistic. We meet a sinister human horror in a different mode.
With Spike’s initiation into Jimmy Crystal’s (Jack O’Connell) homicidal posse and Dr Ian Kelson’s (Ralph Fiennes) stoner-hangouts with the Alpha infected, Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), two plotlines converge in an infernal climax in which Fiennes performs the hell out of some Iron Maiden.
Laying waste to humans and infected alike, Crystal is on a mission from his father, the devil himself. His jumble of entertainment and religious signifiers traces back to the last film, in which a young Jimmy witnessed his infected father leading an ‘‘army of demons’’, a central trauma that drives his homicidal yet childish lifework. Spike has now been unwillingly adopted as one of Jimmy’s ‘‘Fingers’’.
Meanwhile, Samson, the hulking antagonist of the last film, has taken a liking to the morphine Kelson uses to subdue him and formed a strange bond with the doctor. Fiennes is impeccable, communicating sincerity, curiosity, and loneliness in every action he takes.
What we lose in Boyle’s directorial iPhone shooting and flashy cinematic tricks, we gain back in DaCosta’s perpetual atmospheric dread — a dark experience interspliced with sedative interpersonal ambience and musically-choreographed dramatic sequences.
