28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE

 

Alex Garland has long since crossed a threshold where critics ask whether he is capable. The question now is only: what strange basilica does he desire to erect next? Whether scripting cerebral annihilation, or descending into hallucinatory underworlds, Garland’s fingerprints are distinctive: intellect lacquered with dread; beauty with entropy. With the previous film (and now The Bone Temple) he circles back to that infected sandbox he began playing in. Yet this is no nostalgic resurrection. This is Garland stripping flesh from his own mythology to examine the bones beneath.

The film opens seamlessly from the prior chapter, with Spike undergoing an initiation ritual into the cult of Lord Jimmy Crystal, a congregation of ‘fingers’ in which every disciple bears the name Jimmy. It is grotesque pageantry; a wandering cabal of zealots who eviscerate innocents not for survival, but by infernal rite. Garland has always excelled at depicting systems of belief collapsing into madness, and here he constructs a sect that feels like a travelling plague sermon.

Nearby, in a palace assembled from bones, an orange-skinned sentinel keeps vigil. Through a haze of opiate hypnosis, he befriends an infected Alpha, and their recurring encounters become a form of friendship. Amid all the savagery, Garland inserts moments of stillness: two fractured remnants of a dead civilization attempting to remember what civilization was. The result of all this is less zombie horror than necrotic folklore.

For me, Lord Jimmy evokes unmistakable shades of Quinn Dexter from Peter F. Hamilton’s sci-fi extravaganza The Reality Dysfunction: a Satanic opportunist ruling over a frontier world. Considering Hamilton built the Night’s Dawn universe around possession, resurrection, and contagion, the inspiration hardly feels accidental. Here, Garland understands the most terrifying figures are not monsters, but charismatic men who turn collapse into theology.

For the first time in the franchise, an American director takes the helm in the form of Nia DaCosta. Despite the transatlantic shift, the film never abandons a British marrow: accents remain regional, the music pulses with famed British artists, and the ethos is still grounded in damp fatalism rather than heroics. This remains a British zombie realm, where catastrophe feels less explosive than terminally inevitable.

Financially, the film’s muted reception may stem from a refusal to replicate the domestic anxieties of its predecessors. Earlier entries derived power from witnessing ordinary families and citizens reacting to societal collapse. Instead, The Bone Temple narrows its focus upon cultic tribalism and insular power structures thriving in ruins. It is, in many respects, the Mad Max 2 of the franchise: a work less interested in survival than in the grotesque societies born afterward. Ultimately, it works as a sprawling morbid ecosystem beyond enclosed homes and quarantined streets. The apocalypse here is no longer an event, but culture.

And that may be why The Bone Temple lingers. Not because it horrifies (though it certainly does), but because it suggests that after enough years, humanity ceases mourning what came before. Violence becomes ceremony, bones become architecture. In Garland’s hands, the end of civilization is a ritual learned so completely that nobody remembers there was ever another way to live.

NEXT OF KIN (1982).

 
My expedition into bygone Australian cinema continues with Next of Kin, a film which feels like a fever dream beneath yellowing wallpaper. Directed with patience, the story follows Linda Stevens, who inherits Montclare, a sprawling rural estate now functioning as a nursing home. An inheritance is one of horror’s cozier entry points; the creaking doorway through which people wander before discovering they’ve inherited not solely property, but history. Here, our bequeathment arrives wrapped in storm clouds and grief.

Montclare itself becomes an organism. During Linda’s first nights, tempest weather rolls across the countryside, and the film immediately understands the comfort of isolation horror: the sense that civilization has packed its bags. Australia’s rural emptiness is captured with elegance, and the surrounding landscape possesses that peculiar antipodean loneliness.

A young and debonair John Jarrett appears early as something of a one-man welcome committee, reacquainting Linda with the estate and its rhythms. Jarrett brings warmth to the film … which is essential because Next of Kin spends a lot of time tightening atmosphere rather than racing toward horrors. The pacing is undeniably slow burn – although ‘slow’ here feels a somewhat inaccurate. Ultimately, the film moves like somebody cautiously tiptoeing through a hallway. 

Linda begins reading her mother’s diaries, fragments describing Montclare’s sinister history.  Thereafter, recurring dreams blur the line between memory and haunting. A new resident arrives at the home, eccentric, adding further instability to an edgy environment. From there, the film descends gradually into psychological seepage. Horror accumulates.

What surprised me is how slick the production feels for an early Australian film, its cinematography possessing a polished, almost European awareness. Every room … feels inhabited by forgotten conversations and private terrors.

While we have traces of other films here,  Next of Kin never feels derivative. Instead, it stands as its own strange artefact; a gothic relic hidden beneath the harsher sunlight of the Ozploitation era.