28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is exactly the kind of movie that one tends to pre-judge before laying eyes on it. It’s the fourth movie in the 28 Days franchise, but also the second in a trilogy that began last June with 28 Years Later. The finale hasn’t started filming, as the studio wants to see if The Bone Temple earns enough money to warrant making a third one.
In my review of last year’s 28 Years Later, I complained that it was innovative but incomplete. Having now seen this middle piece of the trilogy, I can definitely say that The Bone Temple is not only a hugely satisfying film on its own terms, but it makes the first part, 28 Years Later, a more coherent and satisfying movie in desperate need of a final chapter.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple picks up a few days after its predecessor, 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 real-life psychotic predators, currently burning in hell, called the Jimmy Saviles. 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, infected or otherwise, who crosses their paths.
Ralph Fiennes returns as Dr. Ian Kelson, a solitary man researching the virus that turned most of Scotland’s population into rage-fueled zombies, the subject of the original movie, 28 Days Later (2002), 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 with 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, not much happens in The Bone Temple. There is still some quite horrific violence, but 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 members of the audience to remember the first time they realized they 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.
Hollywood has hurt us before and its greedy distribution models, counterintuitive release schedules and anti-artistic state of being make it difficult for any abused movie lover to trust that the things it feeds 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 audience members 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 by 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.
