When we’re cynical about Hollywood and the movies they make, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is exactly the kind of movie that we tend to pre-judge before laying eyes on it. It’s the fourth movie in the 28 Days Later franchise, but also the second in a trilogy that began last June with 28 Years Later, but with a finale that hasn’t started filming, as the studio wants to see if The Bone Temple earns enough money to warrant making a third one (which, as of this writing, isn’t looking good).
In my review of last year’s 28 Years Later, I complained that it was innovative, but incomplete. I said that “the film is wildly entertaining, but we’ll need the entire trilogy to really know if this rough beast works as a cohesive work of art or whether it’s just a poetic and bizarre mess.” Having now seen the middle piece, I can definitely say that The Bone Temple is not only a hugely satisfying film on its own terms, but it makes 28 Years Later a more coherent (and satisfying) movie in desperate need of a final chapter.
But I also get the frustration audiences may feel. It’s expensive to go to the movies and charging people three times to watch what amounts to incomplete chapters of a story feels like the studio equivalent of holding theater patrons upside down and shaking them until all the dollars and cents fall out of their pockets. As much as I enjoyed Danny Boyle’s experimentation on 28 Years Later, it wasn’t really a whole movie and Nia DaCosta’s The Bone Temple will suffer financially for it.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple picks up a few days after the last one, with Spike (a still fantastic Alfie Williams) now entrenched with a group of psychotic predators called The Fingers, who are all decked out like post-apocalyptic versions of the real-life psychotic predator (currently burning in hell) Jimmy Savile. Led by Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell playing his second iconic monster in less than a year after his charismatically terrifying Irish vampire in Sinners), the Jimmys roam across the Scottish Highlands killing most anyone they cross paths with, infected or otherwise.
Meanwhile, Ralph Fiennes returns as Dr. Ian Kelson, a solitary man researching the virus that turned most of Scotland into rage-fueled zombies, while building a massive ossuary in memoriam to those killed in the outbreak. He becomes tentative friends with a massive Alpha zombie he drugs and names Samson, with whom he sits around and gets high while listening to lots of Duran Duran. The entirety of The Bone Temple is a slow-burn build as we wait for Jimmy and the Fingers to collide with Dr. Kelson and his giant, zombie friend.
Honestly, audiences are going to hate this movie. While it’s never dull and quite funny with some all-time classic moments (including the greatest Radiohead needle-drop in history and the jaw-droppingest final 20 minutes I’ve seen in ages), not much happens in The Bone Temple. While there is still some quite horrific violence, DaCosta and returning writer (and my personal hero) Alex Garland couldn’t care less about crafting jump scares or making what anyone would classify as a crowd-pleasing horror movie.
Instead, The Bone Temple is a masterclass in internal dread and horror. While the film is fun and exciting, DaCosta and Garland want you to remember the first time you realized you were going to die and marinate in that feeling for two hours. As brutal as the film’s villains are, The Bone Temple is also brimming with human empathy, a still quietude, and a finale that is legitimately so insanely badass that my jaw hurt from smiling so widely.
DaCosta’s direction isn’t as formally daring as Danny Boyle’s, but it’s tonally much more coherent. The dread ratchets up expertly and I’ll be a little bummed if the third and final film does not move forward. Boyle would be back in the director’s chair, and he’s one of my all-time favorite filmmakers and one of the few that keep moving the horror medium forward. But I really love the tender, chaotic absurdism DaCosta brings to the table.
But Hollywood has hurt us before and, like any abused movie lover, their greedy distribution models, counter-intuitive release schedules, and anti-artistic state of being make it hard to trust that the things they feed us have any real cinematic nutrients. But The Bone Temple is the real deal: a genuinely powerful morality tale that takes us on a dark ride into the best and worst of existence.
It elevates horror into groundbreaking new places, while also treating the audience like intelligent adults who want more than arterial spray from their spooky movies. And Fiennes gives an honest-to-goodness Oscar-worthy performance and that’s astonishing for a damn zombie movie in 2026.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is better than it should be by a pretty wide margin, but I won’t begrudge anyone who doesn’t agree. We’ve been burned before. If Boyle, Garland, DaCosta, and company are allowed to make the final film in the trilogy (which is set up beautifully with The Bone Temple), then we’ll have something special and singular on our hands that could be a generational piece of dark, visionary art. Hopefully, Hollywood won’t screw it up first.
Grade: A-
