Cinema Year '26: January
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple / Saipan / The History of Sound
Welcome back to Cinema Year Zero. Reviews of three British/international co-productions kick off our new release segment for 2026.
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NOT BY LYNCH continues next Saturday, 7th February at The Cinema Museum with Kiss Me Deadly (1955). A programme note by Alison Rumfitt will be exclusively available at the event.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (Nia DaCosta, 2026, UK/US)
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple has inadvertently turned me into a bonafide Danny Boyle believer. Shot back-to-back with Years, you might expect The Bone Temple to benefit from the continuity of such a process, developing the warped digital aesthetics that made Boyle’s film (our number 5 of last year!) such an offbeat surprise. Unfortunately, the temporal and textural proximity of Nia DaCosta’s fourquel only emphasises what is desperately lacking by comparison. Like the cultish island community in Years, I can’t help but yearn to RETVRN.
At the time, much was made of the final scene of Years, in which eight youngsters dressed in Jimmy Savile cosplay acrobatically dispatched a swarm of “zombies”, their colourful tracksuits tripling as nods to the Power Rangers and the Teletubbies as well. The tonal incongruity promised something even more blockbuster-agitating than Years—but rather than disrupting the status quo of the 28 franchise, where nihilism is the dish of the day/week/year, the Saviles are instead absorbed into DaCosta’s humdrum post-apocalypse. As head Savile impersonator Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, Jack O’Connell pontificates at length, as all memorable villains do. But when so much of the dramatic tension leans on him monologuing before *slam* banging a table or curling his lips as he says something nasty, every charismatic psychopath from the past thirty years of cinema flashes before your eyes.
Not only does DaCosta mishandle the Savile situation by reshaping his specifically-British heinousness into a more recognisable pop culture template, she simplifies the rest of the production too. Gone are the iPhone 15 Pro camera rigs, replaced with everyone’s favourite Arri Alexa. Gone are the punk-flex hyperreal images and bonkers editing, replaced with steadicam stability and swooping tracking shots; a creative choice that feels a particularly poor fit for the galling violence of Jimmy and his seven fingers. And gone is Young Fathers’ harmonising score, reverent and disturbing all at once, replaced with Hildur Guðnadóttir’s trademark droning cello and, worse still, a number of ironic (literal) needle drops. Because we love when a song that’s tonally out of step with the situation gets played, don’t we folks?
What frustrates most is that there are kernels of interest in Garland’s ham-fisted script. There’s a soporific quality to the bonding scenes between occult pacifist Dr. Kelson and hulking alpha zombie Samson, which, while dulled by DaCosta’s adherence to formula, still plays in novel contrast to the perverted theism of Jimmy and his Savilian skin-flayers. The finale, too, stages an intriguing confrontation between the film’s two opposing philosophies, a far cry from the hordes of infected the zombie format normally demands. And then Cillian Murphy shows up to explain The Themes in a coda that exemplifies the placid earthbound qualities of this entry over its nutty forebear. Maybe I need to give Yesterday (2019) another shot. Blaise Radley
