KWIF: 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple and Send Help

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. A Horror, Not Horror double feature at the movie theatre.

This Week:
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026, d. Nia DaCosta - in theatre)
Sent Help (2026, d. Sam Raimi - in theatre)

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The 28 X Later franchise could have so very easily been franchised all to hell into a series of bog-standard direct-to-streaming films, like 29 Weeks Later or 2.8 Years Later or whatever, just shitty no-concept movies about boring-ass idiots getting killing -and getting killed by rage-virus zombies.  As direly awful as our world is now, at least we can say that never happened.

Instead, the creators of perhaps the only zombie film to measure up to George Romero's still-vital classics seemed to retain some ability to control the fate of the series, and reunited 20 years later to bring a new saga to life within the reality that they created.  

In last year's Danny Boyle-directed, Alex Garland-scripted 28 Years Later we met young Spike (Alfie Williams) who was mollycoddled by his ailing mother and as such didn't have the resolute toughness needed to venture into the rage-zombie infested wilds and survive. But when the only hope for his mother was the mad doctor Ian Kelson (Ralph Feinnes), Spike sets out on an adventure to seek his help. When we finally meet Kelson, we learn he's spent the intervening 28 years studying and surviving among the infected, and building epic shrines out of the remains (bone temples, one might call them) out of the many dead and departed.  We also learned of the concept of Alphas, a sort of leader to the rage-infected that have swollen to gargantuan proportions and are seemingly unstoppable.

When we last left Spike, he had ventured off from his community on his own journey of self-discovery, meeting in the prior film's final frame, the Jimmys, a group of blonde wig and tracksuit-wearing roughnecks who knows parkour and dispense the rage zombies without any apprehension. As much as Spike was saved by the Jimmys, it was clear he was not safe.

This film picks up showing us exactly how not-safe Spike truly is. He's been put up against another Jimmy in a fight to the death. The winner gets to be one leader Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell)'s seven fingers, the loser gets to be free of this hellish reality. Spike triumphs because in spite of his timidity, his instincts serve him well, but it's clear that just because he won his place in the Jimmys, bestowed his own wig and tracksuit, it doesn't mean he's been accepted as one of them nor does he actually want to be one of them.  

Sir Jimmy, you see, is a Satanist of his own devising. He teaches his seven fingers the word of his father, Old Nick, who whispers in his head what his wishes are: dispense "charity" and sacrifice on the land. Sir Jimmy was the child of a preacher but was still quite young when the virus spread across the land, and his understanding of the world is shaped by his lack of understanding of the religion that was taught to him, and his own psychopathic sense of self-importance means he desires to learn less about the world, as it's easier to help it burn than to do anything else.

Meanwhile Dr. Kelson befriends an Alpha named Samson. Samson seems addicted to Kelson's morphine-laced darts, and keeps returning to Kelson for another hit.  The morphine seems to calm the rage virus within the Alpha, Kelson notes, and in the beast's haze, Kelson sees a semblance of humanity in Samson's eyes. Kelson continues to experiment with Samson, yielding highly unexpected results, and a breakthrough on the nature of the rage virus. What he learns would, in the old society, be the key to combating, maybe even curing the virus, but the machines of mass production and distribution have long since passed, so the reality of this discovery is tantamount to nothing much at all. But with Samson, Kelson has found an odd friendship, and a new purpose as he engages his scientific brain once again.

The two worlds, however, are bound to collide, and when it does, it's not the Grand Guignal I think we come to expect from horror films. Instead it's something far more dramatic and theatrical. One of the Jimmys spies Kelson cavorting with an Alpha and thinks the red-skinned man (as a result of Kelson's iodine bathing) is Old Nick. Jimmy himself, approaches the man he thinks to be his father, but is quickly assured otherwise, and the two engage in a most unexpected exchange.

I expect there will be a big contingent of horror fans, the kind who watch said films because they get a charge out of the gore and violence, who will be utterly confounded by the direction of this series, who will pretty much hate the majority of this film. It is a movie, and now a series, that is not at all interested in the threats of zombies and viruses, and unlike 28 Days Later it's also not reiterating its case that man is still the most dangerous threat to other men.

No, instead, Garland, here with director Nia DaCosta, are much more interested in exploring how people retain their humanity, their hope and optimism in a world where imperative number one is survival.  In this story, Sir Jimmy isn't the same character as Major West in 28 Years Later. Both are convinced that in this new world that all the power to control society that remains is theirs for the taking, but where Major West approached it as a military strategy with knowing sacrifices to be made, Jimmy approaches the world from a stunted idea of the lessons he learned as a child, and has developed really no further, except for being more cruel and complacent. The suspense of the film is largely in the worry for Spike, and whether the Jimmys will corrupt his innocence. 

With Dr. Kelson, he's finding hope in science and humanity in monsters. The worry is that there's a Grizzly Man situation in play, with Dr. Kelson getting too comfortable around the beast he thinks he's befriended. This is not a conventional horror movie set up by any means anyway, so we have to abandon convention horror movie thinking that things will go horribly, terribly awry for Kelson. It's not just Kelson that humanizes Samson, but the film does as well, quite remarkably. Chi Lewis-Parry's physical and emotional portrayal of Samson is remarkable, so much of it necessitating subtle changes in posture or facial tension or just softness in the eyes.  There is a verbal component as well, one that goes beyond just rage virus screaming.

It's hard to recommend The Bone Temple as a stand-alone film, as it does need the setup of 28 Years Later for some of our understanding of Kelson and Spike and to a lesser degree Samson and Sir Jimmy. But at the same time, The Bone Temple is a very different film than everything else in this series and I found it exceptional and fascinating. Along with backing off of zombie attacks (they're still here, just not the focus), DaCosta also steps away from shooting with Boyle's grittier sensibilities (he shot 28 Years Later largely on an iPhone) and instead focuses heavily on composition and lighting, rendering a surprisingly beautiful movie to look at. The shadows are heavy and dark, while the film's most prominent light, fire, is rendered in vibrant reds, oranges and yellows. 

For some The Bone Temple may suffer from middle-film-itis, where much of the weight is in the set-up film and the concluding film rendering this feeling but an interlude or stop-gap, but this is such a soulful, considerate and contemplative movie, that I find it impossible to dismiss. Quite the opposite, this lives so much larger in my mind than anything from the series that came prior.

But is it horror? Close...let's say horror-adjacent.

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If you've seen the trailer for Send Help, the premise is evident. An underappreciated female employee and her dickhole boss are stranded on an island after a plane crash. He's injured and suddenly she's in charge, and it looks like she's gone a little gonzo.

And yeah, that's sort of it, with maybe just a little more nuance. Rachel McAdams plays Linda Liddle, a meek, homely member of the Planning and Strategy team at a Fortune 500 company. She is the unsung rockstar of that company, an absolute wizard with numbers and planning, but also an absolute doormat. The company's founder has recently passed and his son, Bradley Peston (Dylan O'Brien) is taking over, and appointing his college buddy into the VP position promised to Linda. She tries to ingratiate herself to Bradley but succeeds at the opposite, and Bradley, the tried-and-true child-of-money, full of self-importance, entitlement and unearned status, is frankly disgusted by her. He's been told that she's basically the glue holding the company together, but Bradley seems to want her gone, and puts her on the plane to Thailand where they're brokering an acquisition, looking for her to fail.

The private jet doesn't make it and, as we saw in the trailer, Linda (who studies survival techniques as her chief hobby) takes charge. Injured Bradley cannot concede that he is Linda's superior, her better, that she shouldn't be deferential to him, to listen to his barking commands and his plans and strategies. As much as he needs Linda for everything, he cannot admit such. Even when he ventures off on his own and comes crawling back to her, it's not with any sense of concession... he's admitting defeat, his own ineptitude for survival, but if she's in charge he can only resent her for it.  

This is a really sly and devilish two-hander that refuses to go to expected places. It's a fantasy but it's grounded in a single idea that someone like Bradley will always view someone like Linda as inferior in every situation. And so all the moments and all the opportunities Linda gives Bradley to see her as something other than an object of derision fail over and over again. Bradley can never let go, and always looks for an edge, a leg up on Linda, some way to take control of the situation he is completely and totally incapable of actually competently being in charge of.

In similar films in the past, Linda would be in the right, up until she was in the wrong. Here, she has an early opportunity for rescue, but she says "not yet" (Bradley is ignorant of this moment). It's a savvy way to undermine Linda as the hero of our picture. Where we're with her 100% in the beginning as a trod-upon underdog, with the sudden turn of tables post-crash, we're maybe only 75% with her on her decision not to be rescued. As the film progresses, it becomes harder and harder to stay on Linda's side. Has she become unhinged?  In some films, we would then have our allegiances and sympathies turn to the only other character on screen, but Bradley never earns our trust or allegiance as an audience, and so by default Linda stays our protagonist, even as her actions become more and more extreme.

Sam Raimi has had a very varied career, starting in horror and comedy-horror and adventure-horror, before turning to suspense and westerns and superhero and fantasy movies. Raimi is more than capable of fantastic drama and epic adventure but this is where fans always want him to be. Like Drag Me To Hell or Evil Dead 2, the purest Raimi delivers an unserious thriller full of gross-out gags meant to put a big smile on the audience's face and squeal with equal parts laughter and revulsion.  If he wants to do another Spider-Man or Doctor Strange, fine, I'll take it happily, but this type of production is the director's sweet spot. What Raimi does to McAdams in that boar-hunting scene is as glee-inducing as anything he ever did to Bruce Campbell, and there should be a line-up of A-list actors wanting to get that same treatment at the master's hands.

A damn fun time at the movies.

But is it horror? Nah, it's not really ever scary, it's too much fun. There is one jump-scare though, but otherwise there's no real intent to scare the audience.