In smart splatter horror ‘28 Years Later: The Bone Temple,’ faith and science crawl from the muck

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Last summer’s “28 Years Later,” the third entry in the long-running franchise about fast-running zombies, introduced an alpha brute who kills victims like a chef stems a strawberry, expertly ripping out skulls and spines with a yank. “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” stuffs the audience’s brains back in. Gruesomely both low and highbrow, it’s the movie equivalent of Jell-O wrestling an anthropology professor at Burning Man, which may have been the inspiration of one of its standout characters, Ralph Fiennes’ spry and mesmerizing Dr. Ian Kelson, an intellectual chap who waxes on about humanity while protectively smeared head-to-toe in sticky orange gak.

As the briefest of recaps — this isn’t a sequel you can watch cold — Dr. Kelson is one of the survivors of a rage virus pandemic that wiped out the majority of the United Kingdom in the first film, 2002’s “28 Days Later,” written by Alex Garland and directed by Danny Boyle. (Garland returns; Boyle here passes the zom-baton to Nia DaCosta of “Candyman” and “Hedda.”) The other countries in the world have kept somewhat calm and carried on by quarantining Britain from civilization, a metaphor for extreme sudden-death Brexit.

DaCosta shares Boyle’s tactic of attacking a theme from two flanks: a showy assault (we’re doomed!) and a subversive sneak-around (perhaps we always were). Zombie stories are either about a civilization’s collapse or its rebuilding and typically use our contemporary society as a measuring stick of success. But this series has accidentally-on-purpose traced the plummeting mood of the 21st century. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, disrupted Boyle’s original shoot, and upon its release, his shots of star Cillian Murphy walking through an emptied London seemed to comment on our sudden vulnerability and unease.

“The foundations, they seemed unshakeable,” Fiennes’ Dr. Kelson says in the new film of the last years of the 20th century. (Another character who must remain secret for now trusts that humanity managed to rid itself of fascism.) Having had decades to run free, the infected now resemble Neanderthals. Life has devolved to its primordial pool. This filthy and fascinating film is peering in, nose crinkled and stomach churning, to see what bubbles up.

Twelve-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) doesn’t have any memories of the Before. Raised on an isolated isle, the personality-lite boy ended the last film absconding to the mainland and nervously allying with a posse of track-suited, parkour-leaping, knife-slashing ruffians. Their leader, Jimmy (Jack O’Connell of “Sinners”), who prefers to go by the title “Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal,” was himself only 8 years old when the chaos began, watching in horror as his preacher father hailed the zombies as God’s Judgment Day, welcoming them into church and getting promptly gobbled.

Jimmy is now a Satanist. Boyle used him as an amuse-bouche to get us excited to come back for another installment. DaCosta grants us real time with Jimmy and his pack of young disciples he calls his “peeps,” his “Fingers” and his “Jimmies.” All seven of them are named after him: Jimmy Ink (Erin Kellyman), Jimmy Snake (Ghazi Al Ruffai) and so on, with the exception of a murderess in fairy wings who prefers Jimmima (Emma Laird). Each wears barbarian-esque blonde wigs and masks made from spatchcocked Adidas sneakers, a fabulous touch by the production designers Carson McColl and Gareth Pugh, who also handled the costumes. Instead of saying “Amen,” the Jimmies say “Howzat.”

Having never been exposed to Ozzy Osbourne or any of the standard pop cultural demonic touchstones, these killer kids have developed ceremonies rooted in “The Teletubbies,” whose primary colored landscapes of grass and flowers seem to have influenced the look of the film. Hilarious and chilling in the same gasp, the Jimmies romp around the countryside torturing people in the name of Old Nick, a 17th century term for the Devil, using a familiar strategy: Worship our savior or else.

The religious stuff is intriguing but it’s so underdeveloped that it comes across like a put-on, the cult’s phony excuse for ultraviolence. We do a spit-take when a few Jimmies later claim to take it seriously. They haven’t come across like zealots — they’re Droogs — although when they die, DaCosta has each one shrink from very scary to piteously small, sobbing in fear as they realize it’s all been a scam. Alas, the more interesting Jimmies tend to get offed first. By the climax, we’re mostly left with the Jimmy dregs.

Does Jimmy himself believe what he preaches? That’s the eternal question for many faith leaders, even ones with better dental hygiene. Garland’s script doesn’t quite make him or anyone feel fully realized. They’re all symbols of mankind’s basic tenets — spirituality, science and the need for community — and when they bump into each other in the movie’s bizarre geography where everyone’s ignorant of who’s just over the next hill, they’re tense but curious about meeting someone who’s at once familiar and not. The dialogue is as disarmingly earnest as that between two strangers snorting coke in a bathroom.

If we lived in a rational world, Fiennes’ bravura comic-manic performance would earn him an Oscar nomination. His good doctor has spent the interim years erecting a croquembouche of skulls in the Scottish Highlands ringed by towers of forearms and femurs. He calls the site a “memento mori” and although his neolithic ancestors who also once built strange and lovely monuments on this land wouldn’t understand Latin until the Romans invaded it in 71 AD, they’d understand the purpose of honoring the deceased. (We catch a glimpse of what might be Hadrian’s Wall, an earlier attempt to protect civilization from a marauding horde.)

Dr. Kelson is so lonely that he’s begun to befriend one of those spine-ripping alphas, whom he calls Samson. Played by a 6-foot-8 former MMA fighter named Chi Lewis-Parry, gamely sporting a full-body prosthetic nude suit with a focus-pulling appendage, Samson isn’t tame — many people find that out the hard way — but he can be lured to kick back and enjoy a blowdart of morphine. When high, the movie becomes a giddy head trip with hyper-sharp rustling leaves and drugged-out dance montages that play like a “Trainspotting” pre-prequel. (A scene set to Iron Maiden may cause spontaneous combustion in your theater.) The movie is pro-narcotics, at least for those suffering extreme circumstances, although with a fifth “28 Years Later” film in our future, there’s a chance that the hangover is coming.

DaCosta’s aesthetic is more classical than Boyle’s. Though she began filming just three weeks after the previous entry wrapped, she’s changed up the style while maintaining the mood, swapping the iPhone cameras for professional ones, the manic time-bending cuts for a steady pace and the electronica score for strings. (Her new cinematographer, editor and composer hires are, respectively, Sean Bobbitt, Jake Roberts and Hildur Guðnadóttir.)

She embraces the deadpan absurdity, digging into the ideas with the gusto of Samson eating a man’s brains with his hands, while acting fully unrestrained by quibblers who might take issue with Kelson’s libertine use of lamps. In one dazzler of a scene, he decorates his corpse piles like a rom-com heroine who needs eight dozen candles to take a bath.

DaCosta also delights in goosey jump scares (they’re all just a loud bang) and gory-great insert shots, like a crow snacking on a flayed face. She sets her tone in the first death scene in which a cult member appears to be spraying blood from his, uh, cult member. If that’s too much for you, leave the theater at that point. The wet works get grosser. But if you admire DaCosta’s brutality, please do watch “Hedda,” her take on Henrik Ibsen, which is getting a current Oscar push. It’s not as grisly, but it’s equally cruel.