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In January, 2022, the British cellist Steven Isserlis was walking to a professional engagement when catastrophe struck. The skies opened. Isserlis was holding the three-hundred-year-old cello he prizes above all other possessions, and he watched in horror as it was ruined in the pouring rain. At last, to his inexpressible relief, he woke up.

Isserlis often has nightmares about his cello. Losing it. Leaving it somewhere. The strings falling off without warning. At sixty-seven, he is one of the world’s most celebrated concert cellists, but when he thinks about these scenarios he frowns and gently shakes his baroque gray ringlets. For more than fifteen years, Isserlis has been playing an eighteenth-century Stradivarius cello named the Marquis de Corberon, for the French aristocrat who once owned it. Though it spends most of its time in a white hard-shell case, it faces an array of dangers limited only by the whims of fate and, perhaps, the scope of its owner’s imagination. Speaking to me at his living-room table, in North London, Isserlis suddenly stood up and began speed-walking away. “I’m just going to rush into the other room and put the cello in the case,” he said, his voice growing fainter, “because I’m worried it’s getting cold.”

Isserlis’s instrument is about four feet tall. Worth millions of British pounds, it was crafted in 1726, when Antonio Stradivari, the Cremonese luthier, was in his eighties. Over the course of his career, Stradivari went from making large, lumbering cellos to creating smaller, more innovative ones that became the blueprint for the modern instrument. The Marquis is one of the last pieces he made in this classic form. “The sound is uniquely magnificent,” Robert Brewer Young, a luthier who has made more than fifteen copies of this specific instrument, told me. “There’s an archetypal form of cello that has a perfect evolution, and ends, as far as we know, with the Marquis de Corberon.”

Each evening, Isserlis plants a goodnight kiss on the cello’s beechwood scroll as he returns it to its case. Someday, he knows, he will do this for the last time—not because the instrument will be stolen, or damaged, but because it doesn’t belong to him. The 1726 Marquis de Corberon Stradivarius is owned by London’s Royal Academy of Music, which has entrusted it to Isserlis on a long-term loan.

The Academy provides plenty of students with instruments from its collection, but the Marquis is the only trophy piece that also lives and travels with an international soloist. People at the Academy speak about the pair as if they were joint and equal envoys for the institution. “Steven is a great ambassador for the collection and for the Academy,” Susana Caldeira, the Academy’s head of collections, said. “And so is the instrument.” The loan comes with strict conditions about travel, security, and maintenance; if Isserlis violates these conditions, the instrument could be instantly recalled. In fact, it could be recalled at almost any time. When the arrangement was most recently renewed, the academy reminded Isserlis that the loan’s term was five years. “I said, ‘No, it’s a loan for life’,” Isserlis told me. “ ‘Because if you take it away from me, I’ll kill myself.’ ”

Isserlis was born in London to a musical family, and rose to prominence around 1992, when his recording of “The Protecting Veil,” a soaring, hypnotic work for cello and orchestra by John Tavener, became a rare classical best-seller. In Britain, he is now something of a classical-music celebrity, interviewing widely, presenting documentaries, and publishing children’s books about the lives of great composers. His concert schedule is considered extreme even by industry veterans. “He can’t do anything less than a hundred and ten per cent all of the time,” Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, the principal of the Royal Academy of Music, told me. “That’s the way he plays the cello. That’s him.”

Isserlis told me that he flies at least a hundred times a year, and mostly he brings the Marquis with him. Flying is difficult. The cello can’t go in the hold, he explained. (“Would you put your baby in the hold?” he asked.) The Marquis gets its own seat. What it lacks is a passport number, which means it has spent a lot of time being snarled in airline check-in systems. Isserlis has often missed a can’t-miss flight while standing in a terminal lobby, watching the clock tick down.

Then there’s security. At London’s Heathrow Airport, Isserlis told me, the process involves widely spaced mechanical rollers that cause him grief and anxiety. Isserlis asked if I knew the machines at Heathrow. I said I did, but not in detail. “You would if you were a cellist,” he said. Beyond security are more horrors. If Isserlis needs to use the toilet, the cello must come with him. On flights, there is turbulence. And, in a few days, there is another plane to catch.

“It’s a big responsibility in a way you can’t think about that much,” Isserlis told me. “Because, if you do, you go mad.” Before his never-ending tours, Isserlis has to tell the Academy if he plans to visit countries that may be unsafe, so that the institution can assess risk. The cello must be evaluated in-house once a year. New conditions can also be proposed at will by the cello’s insurers, making Isserlis’s life instantly more confusing or expensive. “I know exactly what to expect when Steven comes through the door,” Freeman-Attwood told me, in a practiced, understanding voice. “But we always find a workable solution.”

For Isserlis, the conditional nature of the arrangement is painful in and of itself. An instrument is an epoch in a player’s life, and Isserlis can tell the story of his career through the cellos he’s used: a soft-spoken Guadagnini, bought in the seventies for the now-low price of thirty-five thousand pounds; a robust and hearty Montagnana, perfect for playing concertos with powerful orchestras; even another Stradivarius, borrowed from Japan’s Nippon Music Foundation at the turn of the millennium, once his musical star was truly ascendant. Isserlis returned that cello after being offered the Marquis: a tacit recognition that he was now the preëminent solo cellist in England.

There seemed to be an element of destiny at work, because he had encountered the Marquis long before. In the nineties, Isserlis was attending a chamber-music festival on the Cornish coast when he heard Zara Nelsova, often called the Queen of the Cello, give a small recital. Nelsova, with her pearl necklace and coiffed volutes of blond hair, was celebrated as a player of extravagant power. At close quarters, Isserlis could feel the depth and resonance of her instrument. A friend turned to him and said, “That’s the cello for you.”

In 1960, the cello had been donated to the Royal Academy of Music, on the strict condition that it would be loaned to Nelsova for as long as she lived. A deep bond seemed to exist between the pair. In the early two-thousands, when Nelsova was dying, Isserlis visited her Manhattan apartment, which overlooked Central Park. He found her in bed, lying next to the cello. It was still there when the Academy sent someone to retrieve it after her death, resting alone on the silky red bedspread.

When Isserlis was born, in 1958, a Stradivarius might have set you back a hundred thousand dollars. Today, one costs millions, a price even successful soloists can’t afford. Instead, many players compete to use instruments owned by foundations and wealthy benefactors. In this inscrutable economy, prestige has a way of slipping between people and objects. The use of a precious instrument confers status on a player until he reaches a certain level of fame, at which point the relationship inverts, and the player starts adding market value to the instrument. Concert programs and CD liners keep careful track of who plays what, and by whose leave. For a small circle of connoisseurs, these alliances are almost as absorbing as the music itself.

Occasionally, dealers and patrons will arrange short-term loans for select players, even if doing so involves flying the instruments halfway around the world for an evening. Joey Carr, a former employee of the London violin dealer J & A Beare, told me that she was once asked to transport an entire quartet for a concert. To get through the airport, Carr said, she wore a cello on her back and a travel bag around her neck, with a double violin case in one hand and a viola case in the other. “It’s very hard to just get a coffee on the way to the plane,” she said, “because your hands are full of millions of pounds’ worth of violins and cellos.”

Great instruments confound our sense of why and how things are valuable. A seven-figure price tag reminds us of paintings, another class of object that concentrates huge amounts of capital. Yet instruments are also tools, a way of making the marvellous sound from which their value is supposed to derive. Each part of a violin’s sculptural beauty has a specific, practical function aimed at helping the player make the best music they can. The challenge that confronts the caretakers of these objects is considerable: how do you conserve an instrument when so much of its value stems from its use as an instrument, out in the hard-edged world, with all the risks that entails?

Long-term loans to trusted players, like Isserlis, are one practical solution, but they have their own problems. Theoretically, there’s merit in a system that tries to match the best players with the best instruments. But the practical upshot is a conservationist’s nightmare: a large proportion of the world’s best string instruments spend their lives travelling the globe for the benefit of audiences that would cheerfully admit they can’t tell the difference between a Stradivarius and a modern instrument. It is hard to think of objects this valuable that also fly this much, apart from perhaps the planes themselves.

The question of how to fly with a cello is a bugbear among many string players. After making inquiries about Isserlis’s cello case, I found myself on the phone with its maker, Alan Stevenson, an English musician who got into the protection industry in the seventies, after watching a dropped double-bass shatter into hundreds of pieces. (Stevenson died late last year.) He said he asked every customer whether they were planning to check their cello; if they said yes, he would only sell them one of his stronger cases. “Part of my business is trying to protect cellos from the cellist,” he said.

For Stevenson, what mattered most was a musician’s level of “awareness”—a term he used with repeated, baleful emphasis. I told him I had watched Isserlis run from the room to prevent his cello from getting cold. “He’s aware, you see,” Stevenson said. He told me that a top player might warily check a good modern cello worth, say, thirty-five thousand pounds. “But for another cellist that thirty-five thousand pounds is a fortune, yeah?” Stevenson said. “That other cellist wouldn’t dare check it in. He’ll check in a five-thousand-pound cello.” Theoretically, you could plot every string player on earth on a graph with two axes: the ability to bear the costs of potential damage, and the psychological tolerance of risk. Somewhere along the line, everyone breaks.

Perhaps some level of pain is hard-coded into the life of a professional soloist, whose existence is structured around the act of performing complex music to an impossibly high standard. Isserlis described his world as one of airports, green rooms, restaurants, and hotels. “I often say I should get a life,” he offered, brightly. But he also told me, in more subdued tones, about the terror before a concert, the sense of vulnerability and exposure. As his audiences have grown, so, too, have the expectations.

When I first met Isserlis, I hoped to ask him about the most famous pieces in the cello repertoire: the mysterious suites of Johann Sebastian Bach, about which he once wrote a colorful and opinionated book. To my surprise, Isserlis told me he no longer plays them in concert. We were sitting on the empty stage of Wigmore Hall, a splendid chamber hall in central London that Isserlis calls his “musical home.” Almost ten years earlier, he had performed the suites here for sellout crowds over two nights. Isserlis said these were probably the most successful concerts he had ever done, but the experience was so torturous he never wanted to repeat it. The thought of going out there alone, playing unforgiving Bach from memory, was too frightening. “Here I am playing my favorite music, in my favorite hall, with my favorite cello, with my favorite bow,” he said. “So the only thing that can possibly be bad is me.”

Since we were alone, I asked Isserlis if he would play something, just so I could hear the cello at close range. Obligingly, he opened the battle-scarred case and pinioned the instrument between his knees, before leaning the scroll against his chest. As his body made contact with the instrument, he gave a boyish smile. “It feels like a part of me,” he said. “It really does.” Then he laid his bow on the strings and played two octaves of a simple minor scale.

I had been worried that the subtle beauties of this great instrument would elude me. Perhaps they did. I can only report that I was literally struck by the sound he made. Vibrations filled the air, making it feel like an element in which we were both swimming. I felt grateful for the cumulative human effort that had produced this ether from horsehair, sheep gut, and wood. When silence resumed, I told Isserlis he seemed visibly relaxed with the cello in his arms. “Well, it would be sad if I wasn’t,” he laughed. “Since I do it every day.” Before the instrument went back in its case, I caught a look at its wooden back. Near the neck was a big knot, where a branch once grew. ♦

On January 8th, the twelfth day of mass protests in Iran, which began when shopkeepers, responding to runaway inflation, closed Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, the Iranian government shut down public access to the internet, further shrouding an already largely closed society. Nevertheless, isolated images and details have been smuggled out, giving a hint of how brutal and monumental these events are.

Video clips have circulated of people outside a morgue, unzipping body bags as they search for their loved ones. In the western city of Ilam, near the Iraqi border, security officials stormed a hospital to try to seize wounded protesters, while medical staff resisted. An ophthalmologist at a hospital in Tehran reported that it has been overwhelmed by casualties, including many people who were shot in the eye. In the conservative city of Mashhad, a journalist said that the streets were “full of blood.” The Iranian government has acknowledged the deaths of two thousand people, though international observers fear that the total may be much higher. The Chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, insisted on Tuesday that the regime was in “its last days or weeks.” If he proves to be correct, it will be because of hundreds of thousands of brave acts by Iranian citizens—acts of discontent but also of idealism.

The portfolio of this crisis landed across classified Washington, on the desks both of career staff in the intelligence and diplomatic services and of Donald Trump’s recent appointees, among whom idealism is an increasingly shunned philosophy. The norm in American foreign policy has been that all interventions, including blatantly self-serving ones, are pitched in elevated humanitarian terms. During Trump’s second Administration, universal principles such as self-determination and due process are wielded only opportunistically. In Venezuela, Trump followed his ouster of Nicolás Maduro not by supporting the democratic opposition but by sanctioning the ascent of the dictator’s second-in-command, Delcy Rodríguez, seemingly in exchange for oil revenues. (The opposition leader, María Corina Machado, could only offer her Nobel Peace Prize medal.) Just after the New Year, in a conversation that also touched on annexing Greenland, against the will of its people, the White House adviser Stephen Miller gave CNN’s Jake Tapper the emerging party line: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

This is an encompassing vision, one that is now playing out in the ICE campaign in Minnesota against undocumented migrants and, more and more, against protesters and ordinary citizens. It also makes plain the hypocrisy in Trump’s embrace of the Iranian opposition. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s government has denounced the protesters it has killed, calling them terrorists; the Trump Administration has said that Renee Good, the woman shot dead by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, was engaging in an act of “domestic terrorism.” If the scenes in the Twin Cities look like those from an overseas occupation, the historian Nikhil Pal Singh suggested in the magazine Equator this week, that is because, under this Administration, the foreign and the domestic realms have bled together, as Trump threatens war-time powers “to arrest and remove unauthorised immigrants—and discretionary police powers abroad, to arrest foreign leaders (and seize foreign assets) under US law.” The Administration is asserting, too, an almost colonial kind of impunity: last week, Vice-President J. D. Vance baldly asserted that ICE agents have “absolute immunity” from local prosecution for their activities in Minnesota.

Even so, although the President’s intrinsic sympathies are with strongmen—Putin, Orbán, Kim—his strategic interests in Iran are with the protesters. (As it happens, the Administration’s old allies in Israel and its newer ones in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states all want the Iranian theocrats gone.) On social media, the President made some gestures of solidarity. “keep protesting,” he urged. “help is on the way.”

Exactly what kind of help remains unclear. Trump’s adviser Steve Witkoff met with Reza Pahlavi, once the crown prince of Iran, but the White House found the deposed royal unconvincing. “He seems very nice, but I don’t know how he’d play within his own country,” Trump told reporters. In posts and appearances, the President returned to more familiar themes: he mused about possible military strikes on strategic sites in Iran, threatened tariffs against countries that trade with it, and announced a little bit of progress—the Iranian government had apparently reversed a plan to execute Erfan Soltani, a twenty-six-year-old shop owner who was arrested in connection with the protests. “We’ve been told the killing is stopping,” Trump said on Wednesday afternoon, and then, somewhat tellingly, struggled with his verb tenses. “It has stopped. It is stopping.”

In Iran, the despotic regime is fragile and desperate, and, as Merz suggests, it may soon fall. But it may also survive, by means of violent repression, and by Thursday the news from Tehran had quieted. Sounds of gunfire had faded; there were no new bonfires. Since the end of the Second World War, the United States and its allies had maintained a system of humanitarian interventionism, until the President so delightedly detonated it. “In the first year of his administration,” the Times noted last week, Trump “dismantled the instruments of soft power—such as Voice of America and the State Department unit that dropped internet capability into Iran—that were key to democracy promotion.” What he is left with are his threats and a hollow sort of exhortation that borrows from the same program of humanitarian interventionism that he has so explicitly disavowed. “Iran is looking at freedom,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “perhaps like never before.”

Perhaps. The President’s statements of allegiance—and, potentially, the internet that Elon Musk has offered to make available for free via Starlink—may well strengthen the resolve of the Iranian opposition. But Trump’s domestic acts, in a countervailing way, may embolden the regime. Cynicism travels, too. Right now, he is faced with a mass protest in Minneapolis against a government show of power that is growing increasingly unpopular, and his reaction has been to double down: on Thursday, he threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act and send federal troops to the upper Midwest.

What supplies all these events with a sense of approaching a precipice is the open contestation between pro- and anti-democratic forces, happening both here and abroad, in view of each other. Through the partial curtain between the two societies, we are watching what is happening in Iran. And Iran, surely, is watching us. ♦

Bob Weir died on January 10th, at seventy-eight, even though I thought he was immortal. I saw him for the first time in 1969, when the Grateful Dead played at the Fillmore East, and I was an impressionable schoolboy. I remember that he moved in a lurching, twitchy way, like a marionette, as though tension that had built up in his body was being abruptly shed. The studious manner in which he addressed his guitar suggested that it had been given to him only moments before he went onstage, and he was fascinated by it. Each chord, each passing tone, each cluster of notes, each pointed remark seemed like the confirmation of an abstruse mathematical assertion happened upon by chance in the midst of chaos. Clearly he was surprised and delighted by his discoveries; sometimes he shook his head as if in awe. He was also beautiful. Later in life, he grew a white mustache and beard, which made him look like a prospector or a sea captain, but when he was young he had an androgynous allure. He had the nature of a polite and well-meaning cowboy, and a shy and understated charisma and grace. More than once, over the years, it occurred to me that he was the holy fool of the Grateful Dead.

I met Weir thirty-five years ago, when I was writing a story for Talk of the Town about a children’s book that he and his sister, Wendy, had written. The story never ran, but I wrote a long piece about him for another magazine. After it was published, Weir called to say that he liked the piece, and thanked me for writing it. In my entire life as a writer, no one else has ever done that. The principles of being a gentleman, Weir told me, had been instilled by his father, Frederick, an engineer.

After that, I saw Weir fairly often when he came to New York. Everyone wanted to party with him at night, it seemed, but his days were often free, and we would take walks in Central Park, or go to the Met, or have lunch. For a time, we worked on a project for which he raised some money and gave me a share, and I would go to California and stay with him and his wife, Natascha Muenter; their daughters, Chloe and Monet, were away at school. Weir lived in Mill Valley, but mostly we would stay at a house he had in Stinson Beach, about ten or twelve miles away. The narrow blacktop road over the hills and through the woods to the ocean is full of sharp turns, with steep drops on one side, and I felt like I hadn’t lived until I’d travelled it with Weir passing cars on blind curves.

Weir was one of the loveliest, most unaffected, open-hearted people that I’d ever encountered. So far as I can tell from other tributes I’ve read, this was a common impression among those who met or knew him. He was also incorrigibly mischievous. Early on in the Grateful Dead, his nickname was Mr. Bob Weir Trouble. I think he was given it after he pulled a cap pistol at an airline counter while playing cowboys and Indians with other members of the band. The gesture got the Grateful Dead banned from the airline. Or, he might have got the name after throwing a water balloon at a cop from the upper floor of the band’s house in San Francisco. Weir couldn’t be drafted for the Vietnam War because he had been arrested for marijuana, but he knew that his draft board had to retain any correspondence from a citizen, so he occasionally sent it anything he could fit into a mailbox, usually rocks and bricks and sticks.

Although Weir was a serious person it was easy to make him laugh. He made you feel when you were with him that he had no other place to be, that things had worked out to bring the two of you together, and that he meant to enjoy this gift from life. He could also be unreachable when a dark mood was upon him, but it always seemed a sort of neurological unreachability, a matter of his wiring, rather than an emotional one. Sometimes we would talk about my son, who is autistic, and Weir would say, “I’m autistic, too.” He might have been, mildly; it’s hard to know. His friend John Barlow, with whom Weir wrote a number of songs, once told me, “Bob marches to the beat of a different drummer, and it might not be a drummer at all.”

He had insomnia, and he struggled plenty with drinking and with sleeping pills, and did stints in rehab. Sometimes when I was with him he would be abstaining from alcohol, and other times he would drink. When he drank, he was mostly solemn and silent.

The first time I met Weir, I didn’t think he was very smart. I’d expected to meet someone who had a life of the mind and found the same pleasure in reading that I do. Weir eventually explained that he was severely dyslexic, to the point that even trees on a hillside sometimes switched places in his mind’s eye. Over time, I realized that he had an original and penetrating mind, one developed from what he heard, what he saw, what came to him in his imagination.

He loved football. I can remember the pleasure of hearing him say, about playing the sport in high school, “I was flipped out about football.” He was a scrawny kid, but he was fast and totally fearless and would do anything the coach told him to. I realized that sports had been an essential model for him as a musician. It had given him a way of finding a place in the Grateful Dead—enacting a role as a member of a crew. For the rest of us, the Grateful Dead was a band, but I think for Weir it was a team. He was a permanent teen-ager, but of a rarified kind—not so much stuck fast in a period as still capable of visiting the sanctified territory of wonder and deep engagement. He had maintained a connection to the place where big dreams come from.

There was a raised-by-wolves quality about him, a kind of loopy, feral radiance. He had been brought up by prosperous adoptive parents, but he’d found his biological father later in life. One night in Stinson Beach, seven or eight years ago, after we had gone to dinner and come back to the house, I asked about Weir’s childhood, and he answered at some length. “As a matter of record, I was born Steven Lee Sternia in San Francisco, in 1947,” he said. “Sternia—‘of the stars’—was an assumed name, an alias basically, and didn’t belong either to my mother or father, who weren’t married to each other, or married at all. They had been living in Tucson, where they were students at the University of Arizona—my mother was studying drama. My father had been in the Air Force, and he was going to school on the G.I. Bill. I heard he’d been the youngest bomber pilot in the Air Corps, having flown, I think, a Martin B-26 Marauder in the war. The B-26 was mainly for troop support, and it wasn’t all that maneuverable. It was slow and heavily armored, and it had stubby wings, and because it flew low, it took a lot of ground fire. It was known as the Widow-maker.

“The deception about my name was because my being born, my existing at all, was meant to have been kept a tidy secret from my mother’s family. She already had a daughter, born a few years earlier, somewhere between Ohio and Arizona. She believed that if her family found out about me, they would think that she was reckless and unfit as a mother and take the daughter from her, although I’m not even sure she exactly still had the daughter. Or maybe they already thought she was reckless and unfit, and she didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of being proved right. According to my birth certificate, her first name was Phyllis. When I tried to find her years later, with a private detective, he told me that she had covered her tracks. Anyway, I was adopted at birth by Eleanor Claire Cramer and Frederick Utter Weir.

“My first memory was probably a dream, but I remember being in my crib and being really painfully, painfully bored and looking across the room to a window and then a round, bald-headed figure peeping over the window into my room. I was two and a half, maybe three.

“My first major formative memory, and first in any detail— my guess is I was maybe three—I was asleep and dreaming. I think I might have been in Alaska or somewhere on the Northwest Coast, although it could even have been the California Sierras. I was in the yard of an abandoned mine of some sort. There were old, weathered ramps and chutes where conveyor belts used to run, but there was no one around. It was a beautiful, sunny day. I don’t know what I was doing there, it didn’t matter, I was just wandering around. I looked up one of those chutes, and there was an enormous dark-gray wolf at the top. He was looking at me, and his eyes had me pinned, and I could see he was about to pounce. Suddenly I was in mortal fear. I said, ‘Don’t do that,’ but he did. Everything went black, and I woke up screaming. Since that dream, I’ve always had more than just a fascination for wolves, and there have been important times in my life when some sort of spectral wolf has appeared in one form or another and made its presence known.” Then he said, “By the time I was fifteen, I was already the person I am now.” ♦

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The Washington Roundtable is joined by Robert Kagan, a historian and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, for a conversation about the pressures facing American democracy, the security of elections, and how these domestic tensions interact with the collapse of international norms. Nearly a decade after his prescient 2016 column for the Washington Post, “This Is How Fascism Comes to America,” Kagan contends that the U.S. has moved beyond the warning and into a full democratic crisis. “There is no chance in the world that Donald Trump is gonna allow himself to lose in the 2026 elections, because that will be the end of his ability to wield total power in the United States,” Kagan says.

This week’s reading:

“The Minnesota War Zone Is Trump’s Most Trumpian Accomplishment,” by Susan B. Glasser

“What It’s Like to Be Trump’s Closest Ally Right Now,” by Sam Knight

“A D.H.S. Shooting Puts Portland Back Under the Microscope,” by James Ross Gardner

“Jay Powell, the Prepster Banker Who Is Standing Up to Trump,” by John Cassidy

“How Donald Trump Has Transformed ICE,” by Isaac Chotiner

“How Colombia’s President Reached an Uneasy Détente with Donald Trump,” by Jon Lee Anderson

“Iran’s Regime Is Unsustainable,” by Robin Wright

“The Supreme Court Gets Back to Work,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin

“The Lights Are Still On in Venezuela,” by Armando Ledezma

“How Marco Rubio Went from ‘Little Marco’ to Trump’s Foreign-Policy Enabler,” by Dexter Filkins

Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

Thwarted and truncated directorial careers are among the depressing glories of the art of movies. Early in the history of cinema, the budgets of films grew in step with directors’ expanding ambitions, and so producers started to exert greater control—and to judge directors severely on commercial results. In the case of Erich von Stroheim, one of the most innovative directors in the silent-film era, such judgments cost him his career while he was only in his forties, when the plug was pulled on his 1929 film “Queen Kelly” midway through the shoot. The film, the last in Stroheim’s history-making ten-year run of silents, has become one of cinema’s most famous unfinished works, seen—when seen at all—in rival incomplete versions. The release of a new reconstruction and restoration by Dennis Doros and Amy Heller, of Milestone Films, (opening at Film Forum on January 16th) is, therefore, a major event. Doros (who produced a previous restoration of the film in 1985) and Heller have found additional unseen footage and used Stroheim’s original script to give a sense of what the film’s dénouement might have looked like had shooting been completed.

The new version provides the fullest view yet of what might have been, of the mighty vision destined to remain stranded in its script, and it suggests a whole lost future of movies that Stroheim never got to make. It’s also a reminder that he is one of the great first-person filmmakers—the peer of Buster Keaton and Orson Welles, to name two other greats whose careers were similarly stifled by industry meddling and rejection. Stroheim’s direction, writing, and performances constitute a unity of exalted individuality, in style, form, and substance. His output is not only aesthetically thrilling but was fundamental in the development of the studio system, and is emblematic of the central wonder of the cinema itself—the fact that an unwieldy machine of mere recording became, in the hands of artists such as Stroheim, an instrument of intimate confession as controlled as a paintbrush and a vehicle of spectacle as thunderous as grand opera. The effort and the expense required to achieve such mighty results proved to be Stroheim’s downfall, with the troubled production of “Queen Kelly” dealing the final blow to a career that had long been fraught with frustrations, interruptions, and conflicts.

The project brought together several major figures in and out of movies. The title role was played by Gloria Swanson, one of the divas of the silent-film era, who co-produced it with her then lover, the tycoon Joseph P. Kennedy. Stroheim didn’t cast her; rather, as co-producer, she and Kennedy hired Stroheim as writer and director, and she signed off on the story. The action takes place mostly in the gilded world of pre-First World War Europe, in the fictitious monarchy of Cobourg-Nassau, where the deranged and domineering Queen Regina V (Seena Owen) keeps an aristocratic Army officer and famous playboy, Prince Wolfram (Walter Byron), as her lover and soon-to-be husband. While he’s on maneuvers with his squadron—under orders from Regina, to keep him away from other women—the nuns and students of a convent school happen to pass by. He catches the eye of an orphaned young woman in the nuns’ charge, named Patricia Kelly (Swanson), and their comedic flirtation, though it occurs at a distance, is brazenly ribald (involving her accidental loss of her panties). That night, Wolfram extracts the young woman, whom he addresses by her Irish last name, from the convent and—in an extended, playfully effervescent set piece—pursues the relationship behind the Queen’s back and under her royal roof. When the Queen finds out, she seizes a whip, thrashes Kelly out of the palace, and places Wolfram under arrest. Kelly attempts suicide; then, returned to the convent, she receives a telegram summoning her to the deathbed of an elderly aunt, in Dar es Salaam, in what is now Tanzania but, at the time the film is set, was the colony of German East Africa. When she arrives, the dying aunt—who, it turns out, runs a brothel—pressures her into marriage with a rich and repulsive old slave-owning land baron. Kelly then takes over the brothel, acquiring the nickname that provides the film’s title—but she and Wolfram are destined to meet again.

Both the story and Stroheim’s approach to it were, in some ways, crowning realizations of themes—erotic obsession, imperial cruelty, and the rot behind aristocratic style—that he’d been developing throughout the decade. He displayed those ideas as much in the decorative forms of royal opulence and colonial decadence as in the drama of arrogance and licentiousness. What’s more, the tale, of steadfast purpose in the face of oppression and corruption, meshed with the story of his life—both the one that he told and the one that he actually lived.

Stroheim was no aristocrat; he was born Erich Stroheim, in 1885, in Vienna, to Jewish parents. (Richard Koszarski’s biography “Von: The Life and Films of Erich von Stroheim,” is a meticulously researched source.) A bad student destined for the family’s hat shop, Stroheim joined the Austro-Hungarian Army, in a subordinate transport outfit reserved for Jews, but was deemed unfit for duty. In 1909, he boarded a ship for the United States.

Upon arriving at Ellis Island, Stroheim reinvented himself, adding the aristocratic “von” to his name. His new life was anything but aristocratic: he went from job to job (including singing waiter); joined the National Guard, in New York, and apparently went AWOL (he told the French writer Bob Bergut, who published a biography of him in 1960, that he resented officers who “tried to make you clean their horse’s rectum”); and was sent on the road by a clothing firm. He turned up in San Francisco, in 1912, and wrote a play that he soon submitted to a film producer. He further embellished the fiction of his noble birth by claiming to be a decorated imperial officer. (He also claimed to be Catholic.) In 1914, he moved to Los Angeles while D. W. Griffith was shooting “The Birth of a Nation” and got work on it—apparently doing stunts, and also, Stroheim claimed, appearing in bit parts in blackface. He then worked as an extra, until his military experience got him hired as a horse wrangler on a movie. The First World War helped immensely: he became an assistant director and a consultant, thanks to his claimed expertise about the Austrian and German Armies, working on propaganda movies including Griffith’s “Hearts of the World” (1918). Meanwhile, Stroheim was getting ever more prominent acting roles, culminating in a part in another propaganda film, “The Heart of Humanity”—playing a German soldier, a rapist who throws his victim’s baby out a window—which made him instantly famous as a villain.

Yet, when the war ended, Stroheim was back to being an extra, so he took a gamble. “The Heart of Humanity” had been produced by Universal, which was founded and run by Carl Laemmle, a German Jewish émigré. Barging in on Laemmle at home, Stroheim pitched a story for a movie that he’d write, direct, and star in; Laemmle took a flier on him. That film, “Blind Husbands,” came out in 1919 and set the template for Stroheim’s career. Like much of “Queen Kelly” and all but one of Stroheim’s classic silents, “Blind Husbands” is centered on Europe’s upper crust—aristocrats, officers, royals—and their relationships with plebeians, including the American haute bourgeoisie. Stroheim himself plays the villain, one Lieutenant Eric von Steuben, who meets a vacationing American woman at an Alpine resort and tries to seduce her under the nose of her neglectful husband.

As Steuben, Stroheim assumed a military bearing and status that he’d never approached in his actual Army days. The performance style that he thereby invented set the mold for most of his future roles; it was a defining trait of his films, and it embodied the convergence of artifice and realism that defines the art of movies. Stroheim’s formality, rigidity, punctiliousness, and unctuousness would be ridiculous if it weren’t for the power that those traits symbolize—the alluring power of the sword-wielding, fiercely disciplined officer and the imperial power represented by the Army in which he serves. Stroheim’s turn as a dangerous seducer sexualizes this power—blending unrestrained desire with a sadistic pleasure in cruelty—as if providing, in his person, a moral X-ray of the imperial milieu that he had escaped.

Stroheim pushed his actors to the limit, doing countless takes, regardless of time and footage, until he achieved the desired effect. He also incurred expenses by changing the script in the course of the shoot and insisting on elaborate sets, rendering old Europe with a profusion of details that convey both a quasi-documentary authenticity and the psychological undertones of that milieu’s dark attraction. The resulting budget was much higher than Laemmle had planned, but there was no lasting discord, because “Blind Husbands” became a commercial and critical success. Stroheim was instantly hailed as an important new director, and Laemmle immediately hired him again. First, Stroheim wrote and directed (but did not act in) “The Devil’s Pass Key” (1920), a now lost film about an American playwright in Paris whose wife is targeted by blackmailers. Then, in 1922, came “Foolish Wives” a kind of a follow-up to his début, which turned out to be both an artistic landmark and a harbinger of production troubles to come.

The story of “Foolish Wives” hit riskily close to home, with a premise based on the sort of imposture that was part of Stroheim’s own self-presentation. He plays the so-called Count Sergius Karamzin, one of a trio of Russians who pose as aristocrats in Monte Carlo, seeking rich people to fleece. (Sergius, in addition, seeks women to seduce—or sexually assault.) Having picked a capital of luxury as his setting, Stroheim proceeded lavishly, expanding his fanaticism for detail, his cast of characters and extras, his vision of villainy, and, of course, his budget. “Foolish Wives” is colossal in its scope, with giant sets that included haughty villas, a vast casino, a majestic hotel, and a counterfeiter’s mucky neighborhood. Stroheim also insisted on an apparently unprecedented degree of physical realism, demanding, for his Café de Paris set, twelve-foot-high glass windows and a thirty-six-foot dome. Laemmle, footing the bill for these sumptuous methods, saw an opportunity to position Universal as a spare-no-expense enterprise, with a billboard in Times Square keeping boastful track of the ever-mounting budget.

Still, Stroheim’s spending was out of control—literally so, insofar as attempting to rein him in seemed to provoke new extravagances. When ordered to cut a location, he shot there nonetheless and charged the hotel bills to Universal. The studio’s newly hired production manager, Irving Thalberg, who was only twenty-one years old at the time, threatened to fire Stroheim as director—and Stroheim, in turn, threatened to quit as the star. Exasperated, Thalberg dispatched a team to reclaim the studio’s cameras and thus end the shoot. Stroheim had again generated vast amounts of footage; his first cut ran more than six hours and he proposed splitting it into two movies. Instead, Thalberg took over the editing, and Universal released “Foolish Wives” at a running time of not much more than two hours—and then, while it was in release, kept cutting it. (The exact durations of silent films were uncertain, owing to varying projection speeds.)

Even in Thalberg’s truncation, the movie is a masterwork, its overwhelming profusion of detail matched by the angular tension of Stroheim’s images. It depicts the seething furies of Old World traditions by means of a coruscating modernism. Its graphic clarity teems with ornament and glitter, visual intoxications that signal delusions and snares. The lustrous surfaces hide moral horrors, silence emotional terrors, and block out the filth beyond their boundaries. Stroheim is, above all, an olfactory director; his characters match lusts with scents—blossoms, garments, hay—and, long before Smell-O-Vision and Odorama, he made movies that stink. His characters obsessively perfume themselves, and his décor is filled with flowers that the characters use to distract themselves from the ambient odors of life, human or animal. In “Foolish Wives,” the ultimate stink is provided by a death scene involving a “burial” in a sewer.

For Stroheim, the palaces and playgrounds of the rich are elaborate concealments of the drudgery and the squalor underlying comforts and luxuries—and even the bare necessities of everyday people. His next film, “Merry-Go-Round,” set in Vienna, brings those two worlds together in the romance of a count and a working-class woman. This time, Stroheim (again working for Universal) didn’t act in the film—and, when he went over budget, he was simply fired, and Thalberg brought in other writers and another director. The movie survives, and some of Stroheim’s work, with its vision of brutality hiding in plain sight, is apparent in the finished product. The film was reviewed favorably and did well, but its prime legacy is the firing and replacement of Stroheim, which Hollywood insiders instantly understood as the moment that definitively solidified the studio system, subordinating directors to producers’ commercial demands and industrial methods.

Stroheim’s prime theme is masking and the fear of being unmasked. Many of his protagonists feign a noble pedigree, as he was doing in real life, and, when he plays actual noblemen, his own aristocratic pretense lends them an imprimatur of authenticity. His next film, “Greed,” is set in the United States and lacks any aristocratic element, but it’s nonetheless also a story of an assumed identity and the desperate price of unmasking. “Greed,” which was shot for nearly seven months in 1923, is Stroheim’s most famous and infamous film. It’s an adaptation of Frank Norris’s 1899 novel “McTeague,” a harshly realistic parable about poverty and the corrupting power of money, set largely in San Francisco. Stroheim, who shot on location, delivers a grungy and grubby story, his fanatical eye for grim detail producing a portrait of ordinary misery that assumes symbolic force.

Norris’s archetypically American tale gave Stroheim an opportunity to build on his earlier depictions of Americans abroad as gullible and oblivious. The protagonist, McTeague (Gibson Gowland) is a scuffling American naïf, a California miner who, seeking better prospects, learns dentistry from an itinerant practitioner and, without any formal qualifications, starts a practice in San Francisco. He falls in love with Trina (ZaSu Pitts), the girlfriend of his best friend, Marcus Schouler. As McTeague and Trina’s romance flourishes, she wins five thousand dollars in a lottery; once the pair marries, she turns into a pathological miser, to the point of polishing coins in her hoard. Schouler, meanwhile, becomes increasingly resentful, less about losing Trina than about missing out on her winnings. He gets his revenge by reporting McTeague for practicing dentistry without a license.

The movie was initially produced by Goldwyn Pictures, which midway through the edit, was merged into a new company, soon renamed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, or M-G-M, which had a new head of production—none other than Thalberg. Again, Stroheim presented a very long cut—in the nine-hour range—and found himself in a battle of wills with Thalberg. Stroheim, who was contractually required to deliver a cut of about three hours, recut the film to about five hours, but Thalberg insisted on a more drastic reduction, bringing it less than two-and-a-half hours, leaving Stroheim heartbroken at the mutilation of the movie he considered his masterwork. (The surviving version is this Thalberg cut; a 1999 reconstruction, running nearly four hours, expands the narrative by way of still photos and intertitles.) When the movie was released, in December, 1924, it was reviled by most critics for its ugly emotions and settings (but not by The New Yorker’s Theodore Shane, who put it on his ten-best list for 1925), and it flopped at the box-office. Decades later, “Greed” was revived and reclaimed as Stroheim’s consensus masterpiece, one of the glories of silent film, and one of the greatest of all movies. (In 1952, in polls by the Brussels Cinémathèque and by Sight and Sound, it was named as one of the ten best films ever made.)

Yet “Greed,” as it exists, is a curious paradox: despite being rooted in real locations and in Stroheim’s experience of hard times in San Francisco, it seems less personal than his best European-centered movies. For all the film’s lurid ambience and brutal action, there is something abstract about it, like the fulfillment of a literary conceit. (I’d contend that it owes its pride of place to critical prejudice in favor of social realism and to its harrowing ending, the two antagonists’ sun-parched fight in Death Valley.) Stroheim’s interest in McTeague feels merely theoretical. Poverty and struggle, as subjects, engage him only negatively, as things to avoid—as if his adopted, aristocratic identity precluded any identification with Norris’s working-class characters. Confronted with the characters’ lack of style, he stylizes them both too much and too little; his actors lack the martial demeanor and gestural snap of the ideal embodiment of his directorial aesthetic—that is, himself. The world of Norris’s novel is not Stroheim’s, however brilliantly he filmed it; his Europe-set movies, especially those in which he starred, exist in a world of his own. These movies, whether about real aristocrats or faux ones, were ultimately extensions of his inner life.

Moment by moment, none of the extant Stroheim films in which he doesn’t star are as inventive, thrilling, and multidimensional as the ones in which he does. His onscreen presence tautens his creation of images; his own repertory of mannerisms, expressions, and gestures is uniquely attuned to his cinematic universe. His next film, “The Merry Widow” (1925), a free dramatic adaptation of Franz Lehár’s 1905 operetta, is a prime example of what’s missing when he remains behind the camera. In the fictitious kingdom of Monteblanco, Prince Danilo (John Gilbert) falls in love with an American danseuse, Sally O’Hara (Mae Murray), and, at first, conceals his royal identity; they’re about to marry when the king orders him to give up the commoner. The results are melodramatic and violent: Stroheim’s lacerating approach to the subject turns its champagne fantasy into bracing and eye-opening bitters. Yet, despite Stroheim’s manifest revulsion at the snobbery and tyranny of blithering monarchs, his sumptuous and suggestive set pieces, and his canny closeups of Danilo (from Sally’s point of view) gazing into the camera, “The Merry Widow” hardly matches “Foolish Wives” in acridity and astonishment. During the production, Stroheim was both extravagant and cantankerous; although “The Merry Widow” was both a critical and financial hit, M-G-M, tired of conflict with him, released him from his contract.

It isn’t only in recent decades that independent productions have unleashed directorial inspiration. In 1926, Stroheim signed with the independent producer Pat Powers and made “The Wedding March,” his supreme masterwork. It shares the theme of “The Merry Widow”—the romance of a prince and a commoner—but now this outline bends to fit Stroheim’s unique physique and manner. The movie is set in Vienna, in June, 1914, just before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand sets off the First World War, and Stroheim stars as Prince Nicholas, known as Nicki, a cavalry officer whose doddering father, Prince Ottokar, wants him to marry rich. Nicki, however, falls for the daughter of innkeepers, a woman named Mitzi (Fay Wray), whom he catches sight of when she is in a crowd watching a procession outside Vienna’s cathedral. He is on duty and she is surrounded by onlookers, and their flirtation, hemmed in by the crowd of spectators and the tight formation of mounted soldiers, yields the most elaborate sequence in Stroheim’s career: flickering glances, provocative gestures, furtive smiles, framed mainly in extreme closeup, together with an object of Stroheim’s olfactory fetish—a flower that, in Nicki’s winking enticement, hints at their erotic bond. It takes a violent accident—call it nature’s sadism—for the two to find each other again.

Erich von Stroheim and ZaSu Pitts in “The Wedding March,” 1928.Photograph courtesy Everett

Stroheim’s method rises to its apogee in evoking the couple’s earnest longing and graceful entwining. His style and substance, form and idea, fuse to spectacular yet intimate effect. He plays Nicki surprisingly, with an even gentler romantic manner than that of Gilbert in “The Merry Widow,” and gives Mitzi—portrayed by Wray in a performance that’s the finest of any actress in Stroheim’s œuvre—a serene romantic exaltation to match. The encounter amounts to a philosophical definition of nobility as something that owes nothing to titles or traditions. Inevitably, this natural nobility comes into tragic conflict with the order of official power and with the disorder of impoverished striving.

Once again, Stroheim delivered an exceptionally long cut and proposed splitting it into two films. Only after a disastrous preview of the combined version did his producer and distributor agree. When the first installment, “The Wedding March,” was released, Stroheim met with incomprehension from critics, and the film, despite doing decent business in New York, was a disaster in wide release. The extended editing process didn’t help; the film was shot in 1926 but wasn’t released until October, 1928, a year to the day after “The Jazz Singer” came out and launched talking pictures. The second part of “The Wedding March,” titled “The Honeymoon,” was never even shown in the U.S. A radically abbreviated version was released only in Europe and South America and subsequently lost.

And then came “Queen Kelly.” Stroheim’s career was more precarious than ever, but the prospect of another independent venture—with Swanson as producer, presumably backed by Kennedy’s riches—held out the prospect of salvation. The conflict that ultimately wrecked the project was about matters more fundamental than money or running time. Swanson, though surprised by Stroheim’s exacting direction, appreciated it and praised it. Onscreen, along with her precision, she seems equipped with an inner spotlight that projects personality energetically with every glimmer of expression. When the action rises in intensity, this gleam gathers quickly to a fiery glow of tragic power. (She also delivers some deft physical comedy.) Her problem was with the story and with Stroheim’s quest for physical realism.

In Stroheim’s post-“Greed” films, he’d put aside high-born predators and their naïve victims, replacing these stock characters with sincere lovers, aristocratic and common, whose bond defies and transcends the social order. In “Queen Kelly,” Wolfram and Kelly pay a high price for their defiance, and in Kelly’s case this price is the depravity she encounters in Dar es Salaam. The new restoration of the movie includes some surviving scenes that provide a taste of what Stroheim had in mind for this extended sequence of foul exoticism and bitter survivalism. (Indeed, had the shoot been completed, the Dar es Salaam segment would likely have been longer than the royal one.) His vision of colonialism is uncompromising: the colonizers import the ornamental forms of European society in order to unleash its cruel rapacity all the more freely. Swanson, despite having approved the script, didn’t like the African part when it came to shooting and when she saw the raw footage. She considered the section needlessly revolting, she disliked Stroheim’s hyperrealistic depiction of crude feelings, and she stormed off set when the actor playing Kelly’s vile husband spat tobacco juice onto her hand. The moment was in the script—but the reality was too much. Stroheim was fired, the script was rewritten, another director was hired, more footage was shot—and yet the movie was effectively abandoned. (A version of it that runs barely more than an hour and omits the African portion entirely was released in Paris, in 1932.)

Unable to find another directing job, Stroheim fell back on acting work. In 1932, he was hired to direct a low-budget talkie, “Walking Down Broadway,” based on a play by Dawn Powell, about the relationships of working-class women and men in New York. But the studio decided not to release the film and reshot much of it with other directors, issuing it under the title “Hello, Sister!” Some of Stroheim’s footage, its harsh physicality unmistakable, made it into the released version, but his directorial career was done, and he subsequently eked out a living in screenwriting and acting. But two iconic roles still lay ahead of him: Jean Renoir, who considered Stroheim “the greatest auteur of films in the history of cinema,” cast him in “Grand Illusion” (1937), as an aristocratic German officer in the First World War, and he got an Oscar nomination for his supporting performance in Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard,” (1950) as the butler of a silent-era star who is unable to accept that her reign is over. The actress is played by Swanson, and in a scene when her character rewatches one of her yesteryear triumphs Wilder uses a brief clip from “Queen Kelly.”

Stroheim’s startlingly intense and fiercely stylized performances in Renoir’s and Wilder’s modern classics prove that his acting retains its full force and flavor in talking pictures. The tantalizing traces of his work in “Hello, Sister!” suggest that his direction would have been no less original or distinctive with actors who speak. It’s as much of a marvel to contemplate his explosive beginnings, in 1919, within the studio system as to consider his soul destruction, by it, just a few years later. By the time he died, in 1957, at the age of seventy-one, he’d at least lived to see “Greed” celebrated and to reissue “The Wedding March” to acclaim. His greatness is justly canonical. Yet, because of all the studio tinkering and trimming of his films, and the accidental losses and intentional destruction of prints, negatives, and outtakes, Stroheim’s art remains, in significant measure, unknown and unknowable. Though his films are startlingly personal and his life story is well researched, he remains a filmmaker of mystery. ♦

There’s something about a zombie movie that can make even an easily frightened filmgoer—O.K., me—feel slightly better about their squeamishness. I still can’t watch Quint get eaten alive by the shark in “Jaws” (1975), but I will happily replay the climactic kill scene from “Day of the Dead” (1985), in which a highly hissable villain, Captain Rhodes, gets dismembered by a horde of the hungry undead. Is it the gristly, lip-smacking hilarity of the carnage—the taffy-like ease with which they pull Rhodes’s flesh apart, the way his bloody intestines spill forth like oversauced hot links—that helps it all go down so easily? Or is it the pleasure of knowing that, sometimes, the worst fates really do befall the worst people? Either way, George A. Romero, the late director of “Day of the Dead” and the acknowledged master of the American zombie thriller, understood how to turn a splattery feeding frenzy into a feast of moviemaking, with room for even the gore-averse at the table.

Romero’s work has influenced virtually every zombie movie since, although, in the case of the British thriller “28 Days Later” (2003), which was directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland, the deviations were pronounced. The “infected,” as Boyle’s zombies are known, carry a seemingly incurable rage virus, which has turned them into an army of sprinting, shrieking superspreaders—faster and more ferocious than the zombies who groan and shamble their way through Romero’s movies. The infected, with their speedy, out-of-nowhere assaults, brought a terrifying twenty-first-century urgency to “28 Days Later” and its sequel, “28 Weeks Later” (2007), directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. There was no “28 Months Later,” but eighteen years after the first sequel came “28 Years Later” (2025), a belated but highly effective follow-up that found Boyle reteaming with Garland, with no apparent loss in creative vigor or momentum. The question of what had become of England, almost three decades after the outbreak, provided startlingly fertile narrative ground.

Now we have a new film in the cycle, “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple,” which was written by Garland and shot immediately after the previous film, using many of the same actors, sets, and locations. Boyle has been replaced in the director’s chair, though, by the American filmmaker Nia DaCosta, a busy and wide-ranging talent. Her credits include the horror reboot “Candyman” (2021), which likely prepared her for this assignment in more ways than one; in both films, she evinces a healthy appetite for human guts and an aptitude for fleshing out another filmmaker’s dark world. Here, she revisits and enlarges the most striking fixture of Boyle’s landscape, the bone temple of the title. It’s a creepily elegant countryside ossuary—Bonehenge, more or less—with numerous skeletal pillars surrounding an enormous tower of skulls. (Carson McColl and Gareth Pugh conceived the marvellous production design and costumes for both films.)

We first encountered the temple and its madly ingenious architect, Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), partway through “28 Years Later,” and both are now proudly front and center. So, once again, is Spike (Alfie Williams), a plucky, soulful-eyed twelve-year-old, who was befriended by Ian in the previous film, and who was last seen being rescued from a pack of the infected by a strangely menacing benefactor, Jimmy (Jack O’Connell). For U.K. audiences, Jimmy, sporting a tracksuit and long blond hair, was a blatant reference to Jimmy Savile, a similarly styled British TV presenter posthumously found to have been a serial child abuser. Both “28 Years Later” movies are time capsules of this kind of British popular culture: a clip of “Teletubbies” figured prominently in the previous one, and this one thrums to the strains of Duran Duran and Iron Maiden.

In “The Bone Temple,” the full extent of Jimmy’s evil is revealed early on. So, too, is the range of O’Connell’s screen villainy, no less impressively showcased by his recent turn as a vampire in “Sinners.” Jimmy is a gleefully sadistic killer of the living and the undead alike, and a sworn son of Satan, as evidenced by the upside-down cross around his neck. His full name, he insists, is Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, which distinguishes him from the many other Jimmys who make up his band of murderous young disciples, known as the Fingers. (They go by Jimmy Fox, Jimmy Ink, Jimmy Jimmy, Jimmy Jones, Jimmy Snake, Jimmy Shite, and Jimmima.)

Spike is forced to become a Jimmy himself, by fighting one of the other Jimmys to the death and taking his place in the gang. It’s an ugly, ruthless, and nastily allusive scene. The Fingers are clearly modelled on the giggling, rampaging hooligans of “A Clockwork Orange” (1971), and their evil deeds feel at once consciously premeditated and merrily anarchic. They’re much worse, and more frightening, than anything the infected could unleash. All of which is to say that “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” is rather less of a zombie movie than expected. Attacks by the infected are few and far between, and most of the violence on display is meted out by the Jimmys. It brought my squeamishness back in full force. Most repellent of all is a slow-burn sequence in which the Jimmys, having stumbled on a small community of survivors, proceed to string them up in a barn and gradually, meticulously flay them alive. What makes your own skin crawl isn’t just the hideousness of the violence but the unblinking matter-of-factness with which DaCosta films it. She serves it straight up, without gusto—and does not leave you hungry for more.

DaCosta’s distinct visual touch is apparent from the opening scenes. Notably, she has reteamed with the British cinematographer Sean Bobbitt, who filmed her two previous features, the dynamic Ibsen adaptation “Hedda” (2025) and the middling superhero blockbuster “The Marvels” (2023). Gone are the smeary digital palette and whip-panning kineticism of “28 Years Later,” which was recognizably the product of Boyle’s long collaborations with the cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle and the editor Jon Harris. The frenzied, nerve-rattling energy of their techniques made sense; after so many years, they yanked us back into post-apocalyptic Britain with a bracingly nasty jolt. DaCosta, instead, incarnates a watchful stillness; hers is a statelier, more ominously composed doomsday vision. It’s as if, with the dystopian parameters duly established, she wanted us to tarry alongside the characters for a while and make ourselves properly uncomfortable.

Garland’s script is a study in extremes, toggling determinedly between visceral, stomach-churning horror and a more meditative, mind-altering register—the latter supplied almost entirely by Ralph Fiennes’s magnificently witty and poignant performance as Dr. Ian Kelson. When Ian was first introduced, in “28 Years Later,” his filthy, singlet-clad body caked in orange iodine (a natural rage-virus repellent), he popped up at the story’s close like a friendlier Colonel Kurtz, from “Apocalypse Now” (1979)—a scholarly, wild-eyed eccentric, who has tiptoed right up to the edge of crackpotdom but, miraculously, not fallen over it. This time, he’s a lead player from start to finish, and Fiennes teases out the fullness of the character—the pathos of his isolation, the brilliance of his intellect, and the fundamental generosity of his spirit—as only a great actor could. Ian is a record keeper, a meticulous preserver of the past. But he is also a guardian of a future that, despite all the death and suffering he’s seen, he is too much of an optimist to give up on.

To that end, Ian spends most of the new film getting blissfully high with a hulking zombie nudist (Chi Lewis-Parry), whom the good doctor has tamed into drugged-out submission and named Samson. Their stoner rapport—“The Bone Temple” is, at least partly, a zombie-hangout movie—enables Ian to study the rage virus up close and see if its effects might be treated or even reversed. Before too long, Samson begins to achieve a measure of sentience, which makes him an outlier character in a very Romero vein: an evolved zombie, who regains humanizing vestiges of his pre-undead memory and even rediscovers certain rudimentary powers of communication. The character brilliantly crystallizes Garland and DaCosta’s most rigorously developed theme: the crippling loss of identity and individual purpose that the zombie pandemic has engendered among the masses, living and undead alike.

It’s no surprise, then, that Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal dominates his Fingers by making them take his name and wear blond wigs and colored tracksuits to mimic his appearance. Or that the young Spike, terrified of being killed by his new companions, will only survive, morally, if he clings fiercely to the knowledge of who he truly is. Several important new characters—including a pregnant woman (Mirren Mack) who fights back against the Jimmys with ingenuity and courage—are never clearly introduced by name, and the unfathomably vicious deaths that await most of them seem only to compound their anonymity. Elsewhere, certain names are not taken away but bestowed, with a totemic, quasi-religious power: it is Samson’s superhuman strength and long, luxuriant hair that inspire Ian to call him that. Jimmy refers to the Devil, his alleged father, by the more casual moniker Old Nick.

The movie develops these ideas, with thrillingly demented showmanship, into a doozy of a third act, built on two cleverly intertwined cases of mistaken identity. One person must pass himself off as someone he isn’t, and another person, his face concealed by a mask, desperately seeks to be recognized for who he is. Remarkably, what holds these dual illusions together is a performance of singular self-awareness. Watching Fiennes merrily cavort his way through the closing passages, I was reminded of some of his more memorable characters from the past two decades: the spectrally terrifying Voldemort, from the “Harry Potter” movies, but also Harry Hawkes, the incorrigible hedonist who rudely crashes the party in Luca Guadagnino’s thriller “A Bigger Splash” (2016). Fiennes’s work here is the definition of a hard act to follow, but it will be followed: the tantalizing final moments of “The Bone Temple” promise another installment, one that will almost certainly bring the whole twenty-eight-year-long story full circle. Certain franchises, too, must overcome their long-term crises of identity; this one, for all its jarring mutations, hasn’t forgotten what it is. ♦