By most standards, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple was not a major success when it came out in theaters this past January. In retrospect, it was something of a gamble; while 28 Years Later was a long-gap sequel capitalizing on the nearly two decades since the previous installment of the zombie film series (and over two decades since the first and best-known film), The Bone Temple went in the exact opposite direction, arriving less than a year after its predecessor. Given the divisive nature of 28 Years Later – in the sense that it took genuine artistic risks rather than serving a nostalgic legacy sequel – it’s not surprising that a $150 million global hit was followed by one that made just over a third of that.
Still, perhaps the severity of the drop is a little sobering. As a reaction to Danny Boyle’s earlier film, it shows just how little audiences evidently remembered about the groundbreaking original, which also took some compelling narrative zig-zags. Now that The Bone Temple is on Netflix, maybe those who skipped out on its January release will realize they missed exactly what they inexplicably seemed to want from the earlier film: An unlikely horror-movie crowdpleaser. Perhaps most unusual, it’s a horror-movie crowdpleaser that centers Ralph Fiennes.
It’s not that Fiennes isn’t a respected actor. If anything, he might be seen as respectable to a fault. The same year that Boyle had his global breakthrough with the 1996 adaptation of Trainspotting, Fiennes had one of his own as the central character in the tony, Oscar-bait romantic epic The English Patient. Both movies were nominated in the Best Adapted Screenplay category at the Oscars, but that’s where the similarities ended. Trainspotting vibrated with a bratty yet incisive music-video energy that belied Boyle’s origins as a stage director, and truly announced the starry quality of leading man Ewan McGregor. The English Patient was the kind of movie people called “handsome” – not that there’s anything wrong with that. If anything, it might have a bit of a bad rap now as one of those lengthy ’90s Best Picture winners that failed to capture the indie-cinema zeitgeist and also inspired Elaine from Seinfeld to cry out in agony for the Fiennes character to hurry up and die already. (She wished she was at the zany and made-up comedy Sack Lunch instead.)
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 84%
This 1996 romance follows a pilot who recounts his sweeping love story to the nurse tending to his wounds. The film is set primarily in flashbacks that follow the pilot as he meets and falls in love with a rich, married woman, a relationship that seems almost doomed from the start. The English Patient is often seen as a divisive film, but it went on to win 9 Oscars, including Best Picture, so if you’re in the mood for romance, be sure to check it out.
[Stream The English Patient on Netflix] Photo: Miramax
The English Patient quickly gave Fiennes little to prove, having scored his second Oscar nomination (after breaking out with a chilling role as a Nazi in Schindler’s List). It also seemed to lock him into a certain English respectability that was perhaps a bit less exciting than his previous work in Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days. I’m not saying his performances were bad. They were often spectacular. But even his popcorn-villain work as Voldemort in the Harry Potter movies had a bit of that Every British Actor Respectably Collecting Cheques vibe. But eventually he tapped into a more comic side, working with Martin McDonagh (In Bruges), Wes Anderson (The Grand Budapest Hotel), and the Coen Brothers (Hail, Caesar!).
And yet! It still somehow felt like a jolt when he circled back to Danny Boyle for the 28 Years Later movies. In the earlier film, he plays Dr. Ian Kelson, whose iodine-painted skin (easily mistaken for a layer of dried blood) leads both characters and the audience to expect a raving madman. Instead, he delivers the movie’s most meditative and moving passage as a doctor who has dedicated his post-apocalyptic life to studying the zombie virus and, more importantly for that film’s narrative purposes, maintaining a monument to the many dead. His scenes with young Spike (Alfie Williams) take the movie in an unexpectedly graceful direction prior to its wacked-out cliffhanger; the man deserved an Oscar nomination for the depth of feeling he brings to a hard-edged horror movie, with relatively little screen time to boot.
He deserves awards attention for The Bone Temple, too. No longer able to rely on the sense of surprise about the intentions of his mysterious character, Nia DaCosta’s continuation instead hands Kelson an expectations-challenging storyline where he somehow manages to befriend the fearsome “alpha” zombie from the first film by zonking him with morphine. Fiennes teases out some of the drollery of his comic roles, talking himself through the absurdity of making nice with a zombie who becomes a kind of friend to him – they get high and listen to music; what’s friendlier than that? – as he mulls a possible breakthrough in the virus that has ravaged Britain in the movie’s timeline.
Fiennes’ storyline converges with the film’s other, more harrowing thread (involving young Spike being jumped into a murderous gang) in a climactic sequence that I won’t spoil except to say that it calls upon a degree of showmanship that Fiennes has always possessed, but has never used with this kind of rock-star grandeur. It’s a scene very much about performance, where Kelson must embody a scariness far greater than what everyone was assuming about him in the previous movie. It’s not audience-alienating – when I saw it at a press screening last January, it brought the house down – but it is pretty daring for a horror movie to expend so much energy on pretending to be scary, and it’s also pretty impressive that DaCosta doesn’t lose the tension of the scene in doing so. If anything, it only becomes harder to predict what will happen next.
As it happens, it still is, because the planned trilogy-capper for the 28 Years Later legacy-sequel cycle hasn’t yet been filmed. Though it was supposedly greenlit in the run-up to The Bone Temple, the latter’s belly flop can’t have helped its chances, even though the third movie is said to heavily feature Cillian Murphy’s character from the first film. At the moment, there’s no release or shooting dates for that project. For fans of what writer Alex Garland, director/producer Boyle (who had planned to return for the next movie), DaCosta, Fiennes, and the rest of the cast have done so far, it’s an enormous (potential) bummer. But while The Bone Temple ends with a tease for that as-yet-unmade third movie, it also gives the Fiennes character a showcase unlike much else in recent horror cinema. It’s a measure of his performance that even if this trilogy is never finished, the movie won’t be principally remembered as a Divergent-style 86’d franchise. First and foremost, it’s a career highlight for a great actor.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Guardian, among others.
