(Nia DaCosta, 2026, USA, 109 minutes)
What has happened to it all?
Crazy, some'd say
Where is the life that I recognise? (Gone away)
--Duran Duran, "Ordinary World" (1993)
Danny Boyle's 28 Years Later, the third film in a series--and first in a new trilogy--that began with 2002's 28 Days Later, ended with a cliffhanger that left some delighted and others pissed. Count me among the delighted.
As last year's film came to an end, young Spike (the terrific Alfie Williams), who gets separated from his newly-widowed father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, missing in action this time around), has endured all manner of cancerous and rage-infected calamities and come out the other side, fully intact.
Then he runs into the bejeweled and velour track-suited Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell, fresh from Ryan Coogler's Sinners and back for more villainy). Jimmy calls his followers Fingers: platinum blond cretins who look like a cross between the Feral Kid in Mad Max 2 and the towheaded terrors of Children of the Corn. (Though he previously recalled odious British entertainer and notorious pedophile Jimmy Savile, they've toned down that look this time around.)
The end. That was it. Until 28 days later...in film time.
Nia DaCosta, who was behind last year's revitalized adaptation of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, picks up where Boyle left off with Spike's induction into a hyper-violent subculture where every kid is a "Jimmy," a miniature version of their megalomaniacal leader, who reports to a never-seen "Old Nick."
Spike is a brave and resourceful boy, but unlike his new companions, he's neither sadistic nor stupid. He will, however, do what it takes to survive–and possibly even to escape–even if it means murdering a fellow human being.
Miles away lies the Bone Temple, an ossuary created by Dr. Kelson (a fired-up, iodine-coated Ralph Fiennes).
I assumed he wasn't alive at the end of the previous film, but Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland--who wrote every film in the series except 2007's 28 Weeks Later--never definitively confirmed his fate, and DaCosta has, essentially, handed the sequel to the madman and the doctor.
No offense to 15-year-old Williams--13 when the two back-to-back shoots began in 2024--but when you've got two uninhibited, road-tested talents like O'Connell and Fiennes at your disposal: it's the right thing to do.
The result is a film that dispenses with the world-building to amp up the weird and the funny with even more what-the-fuck moments than before.
Once again left to his own devices, the good doctor becomes obsessed with Samson (6' 9" ex-MMA fighter Chi Lewis-Parry), the big, hulking, frequently nude "alpha" introduced in the previous film. True to form, Garland doesn't spell things out any more than necessary, but the brilliant, if lonely eccentric detects--or dearly wants to detect--the slightest trace of residual humanity in this vicious, bug-eyed creature, so he comes up with a plan to calm him down, and from there, to try to quell the psychosis that animates his kind.
Just as Fiennes gave his all to the record producer he played in Luca Guadagnino's shockingly good La Piscine remake A Bigger Splash–in which he does a snaky sashay to the Stones' "Emotional Rescue" that has to be seen to be believed–he ups the ante here in ways sure to put a smile on the gloomiest of faces (he also joins Lewis-Parry in a bit of full frontal).
I've never seen a Shakespearean actor let his freak flag fly so high. Dr. Kelson's pop fandom is the light to the film's considerable dark, because it's otherwise as gory as the previous one--if not more so--with spine-snapping, chest-flaying, and plenty of Jimmy's upside-down cross version of "charity."
If you're all about themes, Garland, most recently of the unsparing docudrama Warfare with co-director and Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, has your back with cynical thoughts about religion, groupthink, and whatnot, but I enjoy this series for the enthralling fusion of action, ingenuity, and character development.
I appreciate the larger themes, but they aren't what keeps me coming back, and this entry offers an additional attraction: the return of Jim, the bicycle courier from the first film. I can't imagine Cillian Murphy, who won an Oscar for Christopher Nolan's 2023 Oppenheimer, would return after 24 years unless he had sufficient confidence in Garland's screenplay and DaCosta's direction, but he appears in a touching story line that seems likely to expand in the third (technically fifth) and final film to be directed by Danny Boyle.
From her 2018 debut Little Woods through Hedda, with stops along the way for The Marvels and a Candyman sequel, Nia DaCosta has a solid track record, but there was no guarantee she was going to pull off this high-stakes sequel in such fine style, but I'll be damned: she does. And then some.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple opens in Seattle on Jan 15 at SIFF Cinema Downtown and the usual AMC and Regal suspects. Images: Dexerto (Jack O'Connell and the Jimmys), People / Credit: Miya Mizuno (Alfie Williams and Aaron Taylor-Johnson), Sortiraparis (Ralph Fiennes), Reactor (Chi Lewis-Parry), and The Seattle Times / Sony Pictures (Fiennes and O'Connell).
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