28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is the second film in the new trilogy imagining the aftermath of the Rage virus, written once again by Alex Garland but directed by Nia DaCosta, with Danny Boyle returning for the final instalment. It’s also a direct sequel to the Boyle-directed 28 Years Later, which attempted to imagine a post-Rage England that was also commensurate to the present moment of neofascism and Brexit isolationism. 28 Years Later was a strange and wonderful fusion of elegy and futurity, drawing on the fractured British past to imagine new ways of being English. It often reminded me of Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale in its confounding of mythic history with the imminent future, and The Bone Temple continues partly in that vein, looking back to a time when “there was a sense of uncertainty, the world had an order, the foundations seemed unshakeable” while acknowledging that this period of stability has well and truly passed.

As befits the second film in the trilogy, however, The Bone Temple is considerably more interested in the social order of this new England, shifting focus from the offshore island of 28 Years Later to the New Tribes emerging on the mainland. Garland draws heavily on a certain kind of English science fictional millenarianism – there are traces here of the late nineteenth century vision of Richard Jeffries’ After London and the late twentieth century vision of Derek Jarman’s The Last of England, both flamboyant imaginings of a metamorphosised England at the cusp of a new century. That means that The Bone Temple is even less focused on zombie horror than its forebears, with most of the threats coming from rogue humans, and virtually all the violence between humans. Critically, though, this doesn’t mean that DaCosta’s film is somehow “above” genre, as some reviewers (notably Peter Bradshaw) have suggested; there is no disavowal of the zombie population here, but rather an integration of them as simply one face of an emergent English public sphere.

More specifically, The Bone Temple is interested in the rituals that emerge during times of chaos, especially those that respond to the decline of the civic society that threatens modern Europe. In the final scenes, the franchise finally links up again with Cillian Murphy’s Jim, who we meet teaching his daughter about a “cornerstone of post-war European political philosophy”; namely to ensure that it is “ideas, not nations that go bankrupt,” especially fascism, which was meant “never to return.” The Bone Temple ponders this link between fascism and cultic ceremony, but does so, quite eccentrically, against the backdrop of a kitchen-sink apocalypse that is so mired in bizarro British camp that it never feels expository or moralistic. One of the ceremonies in play here is familiar to us from the previous film – the bone temple of the title, constructed by Dr. Ian Kelson, played by Ralph Fiennes, who has gathered the skeletons of the deceased for both research and commemoration. His goal is to treat the Rage virus, using an Alpha zombie, Samson, played by Chi-Lewis Parry, as his case subject. In some ways, this bone temple feels like a synecdoche for the first film’s elegiac and melancholy juncture between a lost past and unknown future; it fulfils the same role as the cathedral spires in A Canterbury Tale.

There is, however, a new cultic ceremony in The Bone Temple, one that we only briefly glimpsed at the end of 28 Years Later. This is performed by the Jimmys, a collection of hooligans who all go by the name of Jimmy, led by Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, a sociopath played by Jack O’Connell who has based his image on Jimmy Savile. The Jimmys move around the countryside, largely indifferent to zombies, due to their refined fighting skills, targeting the small groups of human survivors who remain. Whenever they come across a pocket of these survivors, they submit them to the “ceremony,” a gruesome affair that,in the version we see, involves hanging them upside down, skinning them alive, and then setting them alight. Anyone can join the Jimmys by fighting a current member to the death, in which case they take their place in the cult, which has a strictly limited number. In this way, Spike, the teenage hero of 28 Years Later, still played by Alfie Williams, becomes an unwilling member of the Jimmys in the opening scene, when he accidentally kills his opponent. From there, he is enlisted into the gang as they traverse a series of pastoral landscapes that feel straight out of Garland’s own film Men, itself also an echo of A Canterbury Tale, before Jimmy Crystal’s mythology encounters that of the bone temple.

Much of the energy and charisma of The Bone Temple comes from Garland’s characterisation of the Jimmys, who play like an envoy from the Cool Brittania of the 90s – a gang of Guy Ritchie lads, raised on Britpop, but gone darkly awry. Their analogue to the pillars of the bone temple are the decaying smokestacks of the town where we first meet them. They refer to Jimmy Crystal variously as Master, Daddy and Old Nick, and he concludes every ceremonial utterance with a sententious “Howsat?” In other words, these cult members are only an apocalypse away from the lads of Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, meaning they inevitably infuse the film with an anarchic comic energy – a large part of what keeps them together in an era of unremitting bleakness. One of the starkest departures from 28 Years Later is that The Bone Temple is devoid of the historical and archival footage that Boyle flickered subliminally throughout his mise-en-scenes in an effort to invoke the English past as a hypermediable canvas in this moment of crisis. But the Jimmys perform a similar ritual in their sadistic fixation on the Teletubbies. Before killing an entire farmhouse of survivors shortly after enlisting Spike, they dwell, fascinated, on the way that the Teletubbies watch each other watching each other ad infinitum. This mise-en-abyme plunges the depths of English media in the same way as Boyle, albeit more comically and bathetically, as the Jimmys picaresquely quest for new vehicles for self-mediation.

With that central focus on the negotiation of power, image and narrative within cultic ceremony, The Bone Temple reaches its dramatic and comic crisis when the Jimmys encounter Dr. Kelson’s creation. This interaction offers two different perspectives on how cult appeal might erode over time. First, members of the Jimmy clan start to challenge different parts of their leader’s mythology once Kelson arrives on the scene. For Kelson resembles nothing so much as the figure of Old Nick (or Satan) that underpines Jimmy Crystal’s lifeworld, daubed in what appears to be blood from a distance (but is really iodine, which neutralises the virus) and surrounded by a monument composed entirely of human skeletons. This sudden embodiment of a mythology that was previously determined solely by Jimmy Crystal immediately sows dissent within the Jimmys.  Some of them doubt whether Jimmy Crystal is really Old Nick’s son and others doubt whether Kelson is really Old Nick. There’s something here of the way that Trump harnessed the Epstein narrative only for it to become bigger than his intentions and eventually threaten to destroy him as well. Meanwhile, once Jimmy Crystal introduces himself to Kelson, we see another consideration when attempting to erode a cult dynamic – the need to play into the spectacle, to some extent, in order to wrest back control. Kelson soon realises that he can only escape the Jimmys’ clutches by putting on a spectacle that is both more dramatic than anything they have seen to date and still manages to subtly affirm the supremacy of their true leader.

This convergence of the film’s two ritual spaces – that of the bone temple and that of the Jimmys – leads to Kelson in turn converging human and zombie behaviour around the idea of psychosis. So far, Kelson reflects aloud to Samson, he has tried to treat the Rage virus in terms of its physical symptoms. Now, after witnessing Jimmy Crystal in the midst of what is clearly a psychotic state, he wonders whether the Rage virus might induce a similar form of temporary psychosis. In other words, the Jimmys become the inspiration Kelson needs to cure the Rage virus once and for all, meaning that his final performance to them becomes a kind of ritual expunging of Rage, designed to apotropaically ward off the ceremonies of a new psychotic era, whether they take the form of zombie apocalypse or neofascist cult. To that end, Kelson absorbs all of the Jimmys’ ritualistic hubris but also deforms it, renders it anarchic and comic, by way of a pyrotechnic performance of Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast” that transforms the bone temple into the backdrop for a hallucinatory metal camp that feels like it could easily be a concert concept from the band’s heyday. One of the hallmarks of the recent two films in the franchise has been the surfeit of full-frontal male nudity, which prepare us both for the phallic signifiers of cultic authority that pervade The Bone Temple and for Kelson’s parodic exhaustion of them in this climactic sequence.

In the process, a new England emerges. It’s hard to say exactly what it will look like, except that something about the Rage virus has been traversed by Kelson’s performance, leaving a different future available for the survivors in the third film, which looks set to bridge the gap between the offshore island of 28 Years Later and the mainland. Kelson, it turns out, has been the transitional figure, since he dies in the closing scenes, shortly after he hears Samson say “thank you,” proving that his anti-psychotic medication and theory has worked. With Cillian Murphy’s Jim appearing in the epilogue, telling his daughter that “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it,” the franchise has come full circle, so hopefully the third film will chart a line of flight from the present as England knows it, in the name of a ceremony that reinvents Englishness somewhere beyond the constricting neofascist now.