28 Years Later: The Bone Temple and The Testament of Ann Lee

 

Nia DaCosta's 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple and Mona Fastvold's The Testament of Ann Lee are visually intoxicating treatises on religion, the former being a musing on faith's corrupting power and the latter on the twin paths of sanctity and delusion.

DaCosta's entry in the "28" zombie apocalypse franchise picks up the story from last year's 28 Years Later, which introduced Ralph Fiennes's survivalist/scientist Dr. Kelson, Jack O'Connell's shamanistic sadist Jimmy Crystal, and the young boy named Spike (Alfied Williams), who stumbles into Jimmy Crystal's camp and reluctantly becomes a member of his tribe of muderous renegades.

Jimmy Crystal wears a gold inverted cross and preaches about Old Nick (another name for Satan), whom he claims to serve. As part of their worship, he and his followers dispatch the naked, raging undead with great skill and torture survivors who wander into their paths. (This is what lawlessness and hopelessness produce, I suppose.)

Kelson has become "friends" with the brutish alpha male he's named Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), and has been calming him with a concoction that contains morphine. DaCosta stages an interesting interlude during Samson's drugged lucidity that provides a valuable, humanizing backstory for the giant and transforms him from horror to hero.

When Jimmy Crystal finally encounters Kelson, he mistakes the doctor's coating of red iodine for a devilish hue and asks for his commands. Thus begins the film's stunning last act, where Fiennes turns his character up to 11.

*****

Norwegian director Mona Fastvold's Ann Lee adapts the apocryphal account of the life of the title character, one of the founders of the Shaker religion and the person who established the sect in America in the late 18th century.

As played by Amanda Seyfried, Lee is a prophet and martyr to the faith that she claimed was revealed to her in visions. One of the central tenets of the faith was celibacy, a condition Lee's husband Abraham (Christopher Abbott), eventually rejected, leaving Lee and marrying another woman. It is left to the viewer to connect Lee's disdain for sex and procreation with the loss of four children in their infancy.

Lee's most devoted companions during the growth of the movement and the creation of the sect's compound in upstate New York are her brother, William (Lewis Pullman), her emissary and protector; and her friend Mary, played by Thomasin McKenzie, who narrates the tale.

Seyfried delivers a performance of remarkable conviction, despite the astounding nature of Lee's revelations and her claims to being Jesus Christ returned to earth. The unsustainable nature of the faith's doctrine of celibacy for all members would suggest it was not divinely inspired.

The film is superbly crafted and artful and partly told through lovely, minimalist songs written by alternative composer Daniel Blumberg and based on Shaker hymns. And the movie's intricate dances were choreographed by Celia Rowlson-Hall.