‘28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’ Is the Perfect Franchise Bridge

Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later was probably the most pleasant moviegoing surprise of 2025: a grandly scaled, genuinely lyrical horror film that doubled smartly as a post-Brexit allegory. The central image of the narrow, partially submerged causeway linking the tidal island of Lindisfarne to the rest of the U.K. broadly evoked a nation’s isolationist impulses while also suggesting the desire, tenuous and terrified, to reach out and connect. Working with longtime collaborators Alex Garland and Anthony Dod Mantle—whose soulful screenplay and virtuosic, iPhone-based cinematography, respectively, represented some of the best work of both men’s careers—Boyle etched an indelible portrait of the British Empire after sunset, a future-shock vision of a post-pandemic society RETVRNING to its medieval roots.

It’s strange to think that Boyle integrated Taylor Holmes’s anxious reading of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Boots” into his film’s editing rhythms only after clocking its effectiveness in the trailer; the organizing postmodern principle of 28 Years Later is what it looks like when cultural and political history collapse in on themselves and what gets salvaged from the wreckage. The harrowing adventures of 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams)—born into a twilight zone and bridling against the warrior birthright bestowed by his father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson)—are juxtaposed against coming-of-age tropes à la The Road, all in the service of a morbid poeticism. The extended passages set at the gleaming ossuary known as the Bone Temple—the life’s work of iodine-slathered survivor Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes)—effectively shifted a series previously content to stylishly cannibalize and regurgitate George A. Romero into existential territory. “Memento amoris,” whispers the good doctor to Spike after humanely euthanizing the kid’s mother, Isla (Jodie Comer). Persuasively preaching the sanctity of love in a movie that also depicts a massive, stark-naked rage zombie ripping out his victims’ spines is no mean feat. 

The same goes for positioning Jimmy Savile and the Teletubbies as enduring British cultural signifiers, especially considering the incongruity for a North American audience. It takes guts these days to keep things so specific. 28 Years Later’s cliff-hanger climax, stranding Spike with a pack of tracksuited sociopaths presided over by the chavvy Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), edged all the way to the precipice of unintentional comedy and bad taste—healthy signs of a creative team willing to take risks.

It’s in this same leap-of-faith spirit that American director Nia DaCosta steps in to join Boyle and his merry band for The Bone Temple, a swiftly produced and satisfyingly worthy sequel that recognizes its status as a bridge—a third film has been tentatively green-lit—while succeeding on its own pressurized and self-contained terms. With Dod Mantle swapped out for Sean Bobbitt and Boyle pulling producer duty, the strongest connective presence between the two films is Garland, whose script is, once again, a marvelous balancing act of suggestion and substance. Clearly, the rage virus brings out the best in him: In The Bone Temple, he cleverly knots his own most precariously dangling loose ends while cultivating a set of even wilder enigmas to meditate on until the next installment. 

The wild card is DaCosta, a talented but uneven director coming off a desultory tour of duty for Marvel (2023’s The Marvels) and the ambitious Henrik Ibsen adaptation Hedda, which played the festival circuit last fall before getting lost in the streaming shuffle. The Bone Temple may be a job for hire, but DaCosta understands the assignment. Instead of academicizing the material as in her intelligent but underwhelming 2021 revision of Candyman, she grinds it—steadily and gleefully—into a bloody pulp. The results are lean but meaty, with plenty of marrow to extract from the rotted ivory tower. 

If there’s one thing that Garland likes—a fascination verging on a fetish—it’s tight-knit bands of brothers. The camouflage-clad soldiers selling the heroes on a disingenuous sense of sanctuary in 28 Days Later spawned a series of successors in Annihilation, Civil War, and Warfare The Bone Temple tweaks the template by focusing on Sir Jimmy Crystal’s roving, blond-wigged marauders, recalibrating them from their previous status as an unlikely (if unsettling) deus ex machina into complex avatars for how bad times give rise to cults of personality. We already know from 28 Years Later that O’Connell’s character was a child during the onset of the rage virus and that his last glimpse of his father—a rural pastor—was as a demon seemingly leading a horde of infected through his local church. The upshot is that Sir Lord Jimmy has styled himself as a kind of Antichrist, recruiting followers by claiming direct communication with “Old Nick.”  His rhetoric for seeking out and slaughtering uninfected civilians is that the devil is making him do it; meanwhile, he keeps his followers in line—and their lethal skills sharp—by occasionally offering potential victims a chance to join the group by killing and replacing one extant member.

It’s via this diabolical management style that Spike becomes one of Sir Lord Jimmy’s “Fingers.” In The Bone Temple’s superbly staged opening sequence, he’s forced to battle an older, stronger gang member—and dispatches him with a lucky strike on a major artery. The slapstick trauma of Spike’s victory, which leaves him shell-shocked and soaked in arterial spray, is particularly startling given the way 28 Years Later worked to generate respect for death, and it’s this dialectic between callowness and care that gives The Bone Temple its shape. While the Fingers continue roaming the countryside in search of candidates for “charity”—Sir Lord Jimmy’s euphemism for skin-flaying torture—Dr. Kelson is shown continuing his own lonely mission, with a significant twist: Instead of just dodging the members of the infected patrolling the woods beyond the Bone Temple, he’s resolved to study them—specifically, whether it’d be possible to concoct a pharmacological cocktail potent enough to offset or even reverse the rage virus’s effects.

That his most likely test subject is “Samson”—the towering, aforementioned spine-ripping alpha portrayed by former MMA fighter Chi Lewis-Parry—is an example of Garland’s hell-bent goofiness; that The Bone Temple locates real emotion in the tentative, drug-addled interactions between a mute, mountainous zombie and Fiennes’s scrawny, orange-tinted Good Samaritan testifies to his savvy instincts as a dramatist. Is it a bit too tidy when Dr. Kelson—having paralyzed Samson mid-rampage with a blow dart’s worth of morphine and plucked arrows out of his mottled skin—invokes the myth of Androcles and the lion? Of course it is, but broad strokes can be vivid. Aesop’s Fables, the Old Testament, the Book of Revelation, Duran Duran’s greatest hits: The fundamental things still apply as time goes by. Like nobody less than John Boorman circa Zardoz, Garland threads the needle intrepidly between religious, secular, and pop iconography. He also macramés in a few gossamer threads of absurdism; for all the prerelease speculation about how The Bone Temple would build on the first installment, nobody could have predicted how closely it would resemble a dudes-rock stoner comedy or, conversely, how that trippiness might metastasize into a kind of cosmic melancholy. 

The sight gag of a zombie tripping balls works because it’s an apparent non sequitur and because Parry, buried in bulbous scar tissue and kitted out with the most notable prosthetic genitalia since Dirk Diggler, is a magnetic actor even in the (near) total absence of dialogue. It’s an unlikely performance, but it works. As for his scene partner, well: In solidarity with the kamikaze spirit of The Bone Temple (and the whole 28 Years Later experience), I’ll go out on a limb and say that Fiennes’s work here occupies the top slot of his entire filmography. 

The paradox of Fiennes’s acting has always resided in his judicious, stage-trained technique. He’s so precise and controlled that he can be a cipher, whether the role calls for it or not. As Dr. Kelson, his natural guardedness is contextualized by the postapocalyptic setting and offset by the character’s desire to open up—to Spike and his mom in 28 Years Later and to Samson here. Loneliness is transubstantiated into compassion. In one of the film’s best scenes, Dr. Kelson cautiously exchanges pleasantries with Sir Lord Jimmy, compelling the latter to call him the only person he’s ever really liked. The pathos of that statement bleeds through the showy, strategically appalling flamboyance of O’Connell’s acting, which DaCosta controls even more effectively than Ryan Coogler did in Sinners

There’s not much more that can be said about The Bone Temple’s contents without stepping on Garland’s most carefully prepared revelations; suffice it to say that the raft of articles about Boyle’s plans for the next installment in the series have spoiled one major detail but also that the plot point in question plays as something more substantial than fan service. (As for the other big surprise, it’s a matter of staging rather than story, and the audience in Toronto gave it an actual ovation.) There’s sure to be some debate about whether releasing The Bone Temple in the doldrums of Dumpuary is a misstep or a masterstroke; I’d say that it benefits from being seen in such close proximity to its predecessor and that the accrued goodwill between them is enough that this new trilogy should be considered a classic if Boyle sticks the landing.

With that in mind, it might seem silly to invoke The Lord of the Rings as a point of comparison, but Garland and Boyle—and now DaCosta—are working in a similarly mythic, epic register. There’s only one tower in The Bone Temple, but its relative smallness belies how ably it conveys a larger reality beyond the frame. More than any recent end-of-the-world allegory, the verdant, overgrown wasteland of the 28 Years Later films feels uncannily—and tenderly—like home: contested territory that’s at once dangerous to navigate and hopefully still worth saving. To paraphrase Dr. Kelson’s beloved Simon Le Bon, it’s an ordinary world; watching its inhabitants learn to survive is as thrilling as movies get these days.