With Danny Boyle taking time out from the 28 Days Later series for the second time, it’s up to original screenwriter Alex Garland to provide thematic continuity with this fourth installment, and thus the third installment, which took place 28 years after the first movie did, has become a trilogy unto itself with its own internal plot structure. What’s fascinating about this decision is that it essentially does away with the original “zombie” hook that attracted viewers. The previous movie ended with the adolescent boy Spike (Alfie Williams) trying to return to the relative safety of his settlement of Uninfected after delivering his terminally ill mother to a doctor who would see she receives a proper sendoff. However, right before the end credits roll he is captured by a roving cult headed by a charismatic monster named Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell). The new movie starts up where the previous one left off, with Spike being initiated into the cult’s horrific worship of Old Nick, meaning Satan, which entails not only slaughtering the supposedly mindless creatures infected with the Rage virus, but also torturing and killing uninfected people for the purpose of…well, Crystal’s reasons are never succinctly laid out, but it has something to do with watching his vicar father turn into a ravening devil by the virus and deciding he must serve his own Godless impulses. 

Consequently, The Bone Temple is much less concerned with the Infected than the previous stories in the series, and for what it’s worth Jimmy Crystal and his “Fingers,” with their identical blonde wigs (fashioned after the coiffure of the BBC announcer Jimmy Savile, later revealed to be a serial pedophile) and gleeful habit of skinning people alive, are much scarier than the Infected since they aren’t propelled to violence by the virus’s need to propigate but rather by the human capacity for pure evil. Spike’s initiation into the cult, which he can’t refuse, is to kill another member in cold blood. Whatever Garland intended for the cult to represent in this land, which as we discovered in the last movie is the UK after a decades-long quarantine from the rest of the world has left it practically devoid of humankind, he obviously sees it as the natural product of the desperation borne of a nihilistically Manichean existence—chomp or be chomped. That’s where Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) provides counter-balance. Kelson has maintained his medical ethics amid the Infected apocalypse by creating the titular memorial to all who have died as a result of the virus, be they infected or otherwise, and in the process has determined that the Infected have souls and are capable of rational thought, which he tries to cultivate in one particular “alpha” he names Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), whom we first see ripping a soldier’s spine out of his body. The two plot threads are brought together when Crystal mistakenly concludes that Kelson is Old Nick, and Kelson allows him to believe that for reasons that are not clear until the two meet in an impossibly insane climax. Suffice to say that Kelson recognizes, at this stage, that the Jimmy Crystals of the world are worse for humanity than the Infected are. 

Director Nia DaCosta distinguishes her style from Boyle’s usually manic technique by fixing the camera’s gaze on the most disturbing images. The Bone Temple is not only much gorier than the three previous movies, it’s more focused on the unadulterated cruelty that only sentient human beings are capable of. My main misgiving is that Boyle is slated to return for the third installment in the trilogy, and I don’t know if his methods are right for the way Garland has developed the story. As a work of cinematic horror, The Bone Temple may be the best of the batch, but it can’t be properly appreciated in isolation. The whole trilogy stands or falls as a unified epic. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple home page in Japanese