[COLUMN] The Bone Temple is a Film About Healing at the End of the World | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, which is now in theatres. Those spoilers are from the opening lines of the piece. If you’re looking for a quick recommendation, it’s great. It’s not quite as transcendental as Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later was, particularly technically and emotionally. As weird as it might be to say this about a movie where Ralph Fiennes has what can best be described as “a Trainspotting subplot with a zombie”, it is much more “meat and potatoes” zombie horror movie than 28 Years Later. It’s still a very good time. But if you want to see it completely blind, feel free to bookmark and come back.

Towards the end of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, there is a sharp cut away from the main body of the film to join Jim (Cillian Murphy), the protagonist of the original 28 Days Later. Jim is now a much older man, and he is homeschooling his daughter Sam (Maiya Eastmond). He is preparing her for a history exam the following day, asking her to compare post-Soviet Russia with the Weimar Republic. He inevitably circles around to talking about the end of the Second World War.

Specifically, he talks about the terms of surrender imposed on the losing fascist nations like Germany and Japan. He contrasts Europe’s financial support of Germany at the end of the Second World War to the humiliation at the Versailles Conference at the end of the First World War. Sam wonders whether it was fair that the victors had to pay. “Better than fair,” Jim offers. “Desirable.” According to Jim, this arrangement was “to make it so ideas went bankrupt, not people.”

One of the more charming jokes of Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later was the notion of a British culture and history that froze when the zombie apocalypse hit in 2002. Cult leader Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) has refined Tellytubbies into an oral history while dressing his followers like yet-to-be-disgraced Jimmy Savile. Young Spike (Alfie Williams) passed now-defunct landmarks like the Happy Eater or the Sycamore Gap Tree, which still survived in this alternate Britain dislocated in time.

At the end of The Bone Temple, this becomes a grim punchline as Jim narrates a theory of western history that made perfect sense in the context of Britain in 2002, at a time when people still believed that they lived in “the end of history” and “the unipolar moment.” Jim offers a triumphant account of the post-Second World War international order. “Fascism, nationalism, populism. All defeated, never to return.” There are plenty of bleak jokes in The Bone Temple, but that might be the darkest.

The past decade or so has seen a resurgence in populism, nationalism and even fascism in previously democratic nations. This was a major thematic concern of Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later, a film that was saturated in British imagery and iconography to chart a parable for the death of British exceptionalism particularly in the wake of Brexit. 28 Years Later was a film which featured shots of the English flag on fire and portraits of Boyle’s past collaborator Queen Elizabeth II.

In this sense, it is perhaps a bold choice for Boyle to hand off The Bone Temple to an American director like Nia DaCosta. To be fair to DaCosta, she has long history with Britain. She studied at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London and her father was born and raised there. Still, there is a sense in which Alex Garland’s script for The Bone Temple is less specifically about the United Kingdom, focused as it is on a blonde-haired charlatan leading an apocalyptic death cult.

One of the more interesting aspects of The Bone Temple is how DaCosta and Garland create a tangible sense of a culture almost three decades past the end of the world. The young people living in this post-apocalyptic hellscape have no frame of reference for how things were before. Repeatedly during The Bone Temple, young survivors like Jimmima (Emma Laird) or Kelly (Erin Kellyman) will dispatch attacking infected without breaking their stride. These monsters are just a fact of life.

Even Doctor Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), an older survivor, concedes that while he can remember “details, events, people”, he has no recall of the day-to-day reality of what it was actually like to live in a world with “shops and fridges and phones and personal computers.” Kelson confesses that the strongest memory he has of that before time is that “the foundation seemed… unshakable.” However, looking at the world around him, the foundation has clearly been shaken.

As with Boyle’s 28 Years Later, the metaphor is not exactly subtle. The Bone Temple speaks to a world in which that post-Cold War political, economical and social order that Jim explains to Sarah has completely collapsed into chaos. The world seems to stumble from one crisis to another: a massive global pandemic that left millions dead, the largest land war in Europe since the Second World War, genocide in Gaza, the toppling of the Venezuelan government and so many more.

28 Years Later and The Bone Temple form an interesting duology. DaCosta’s style is appreciably different from Boyle’s. The Bone Temple is well-made, but there is nothing as transcendental as the “Boots” sequence or the causeway crossing from the previous film. The two films also, wisely, adoptedly markedly different tones to differentiate themselves from one another. 28 Years Later is somber and funereal. The Bone Temple is gonzo and blacky funny.

However, the two films also have markedly different thematic outlooks, in the way that many great sequels do. 28 Years Later is a film about accepting the necessity (and even desirability) of death, the story of Spike confronting the inevitable death of his mother Isla (Jodie Comer). “Memento mori,” as Kelson muses. The Bone Temple is designed to address the opposite question, the challenge of what it means to live through something like this. As Kelson also puts it, “Memento amori.”

To circle back to Jim’s history lecture at the end of the film, The Bone Temple is preoccupied with the question of whether there is a way back from this chaotic broken world, both on a personal and on a cultural level. The Bone Temple begins with two back-to-back sequences in which major characters commit murder on screen. Spike is forced to kill one of Crystal’s followers (Sam Locke) to save his own life. Then the audience witnesses an infected man Kelson has named “Sampon” (Chi Lewis-Parry) rip a poor victim’s (Gareth Locke) head from his body and feast on the brains inside.

The Bone Temple acknowledges that surviving in such a world likely means that a person has done terrible and almost certainly monstrous things. Crystal binds his followers to him through performative acts of sadism. These acts are so grotesque that even his more experienced and committed loyalists occasionally find themselves throwing up at the sight of them. At one point, Spike tries to escape with one of the cult’s victims (Mirren Mack), but she rejects him.

Spike’s experience with Crystal is paralleled with Kelson’s unlikely relationship with Samson. After tranquilizing Samson with an opioid to treat some arrow injuries, the two strike a strange bond. Samson comes to visit Kelson, craving more of the painkiller. The two get high together. Even though Samson cannot speak, he clearly cares for Kelson. He shows up at one point with the head of a deer as a gift, audibly upset when he sees Kelson taking a razor blade to his own head to shave.

Kelson comes to think of Samson as “a friend”, at one point even clarifying that he is “a good friend.” He wonders what goes on inside Samson’s head, pondering out loud whether the infection is merely “clouding [his] mind rather than replacing it.” He approaches Samson with empathy as a doctor, noting that infection causes physical symptoms, but wondering if it also affects the victim’s perception of reality. “When the infected attack,” Kelson asks rhetorically, “what do they see?”

Kelson does not know the answer, but the audience does. During that first kill, the audience is briefly allowed to see through Samson’s eyes. His victim has a monstrous distorted face, appearing threatening and violent. Noting that the infected will slaughter children and babies, who pose no threat, he deduces that they must suffer hallucinations. “Seeing things that are not there,” Kelson muses. “A doctor would call that psychosis.” Even as the world falls apart around him, Kelson is a doctor. Healing is his business.

“Psychosis” is an interesting choice of word. It is also a pointed one. The word “psychosis” is often used in contemporary discussions of the portions of the public who have fallen under the sway of nationalist or populist leaders, who believe things that are demonstrably false, and have used those beliefs to justify outrageous acts of violence. The Bone Temple suggests that if this behavior can be properly identified, it can also be treated.

Kelson manages to get through Samson’s psychosis, putting together a cocktail of medication that serves to lift the cloud that had settled over his mind. Samson remembers life before infection. He even learns to speak again. Finding Kelson dying at the center of the eponymous ossuary towards the end of the film, Samson is able to finally acknowledge what his friend has done for him. “Thank you,” Samson tells the doctor.

The Bone Temple suggests that the same is true for at least some of Crystal’s followers. Kelson dies because he provokes Crystal, risking his life in an effort to save Spike. Spike breaks down crying by Kelson, wondering why this old man would sacrifice his life for a murderer. “I thought you’d suffered enough,” Kelson acknowledges. While Crystal’s other followers all die over the course of the film, Kelly and Spike are able to find their way back to themselves and something approaching freedom.

Of course, The Bone Temple acknowledges that such forgiveness and reconciliation is not assured. Crystal suffers from his own psychosis. He hears a voice in his head that he is convinced is “Old Nick”, which directs him to indulge his worst impulses. Kelson responds to Crystal with something approaching empathy in their conversations, but is also smart enough to understand that Crystal is beyond redemption or reason. It’s an important distinction, but Kelson is able to make it.

In some ways, The Bone Temple makes an interesting companion piece to Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man, another recent film about the importance of “grace for [one’s] enemy, grace for the broken, grace for those who deserve it the least, but who need it the most – for the guilty.” As grim and grotesque as The Bone Temple can be, it is a compellingly humanist work. Jim’s history lesson about the importance of charity in victory is just an expression of Kelson’s philosophy.

When this chaotic and apocalyptic moment passes – and one must believe that the moment will pass – what comes next? Can there be a return to something even approaching civility after everything that has happened? Without ever seeming naïve or facile, The Bone Temple retains some hope that there is a way back from the end of the world.