28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

From a distance, the Bone Temple still looks like a warning, a pagan structure erected to repel the curious and the hopeful alike. But “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” isn’t interested in keeping us out. Nia DaCosta’s ferocious sequel drags us straight inside, insisting that whatever future humanity has left will be decided not by the infected, but by the rituals we invent to live with them.

Where Danny Boyle’s “28 Years Later” treated the Bone Temple as a symbolic endpoint, a place of grief, memory, and uneasy reconciliation, DaCosta and returning screenwriter Alex Garland transform it into a crucible. This is a harsher, bloodier, and more confrontational film, one that assumes familiarity with its predecessor and wastes no time easing the audience back into this ravaged England. Civilization hasn’t just stalled; it’s begun to rot in competing directions.

The story fractures along three uneasy axes. There’s Spike (Alfie Williams), the wide-eyed survivor whose moral compass is repeatedly tested by adulthood arriving too soon. There’s Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), a grinning avatar of post-apocalyptic nihilism, who has turned trauma into theology and cruelty into community. And there’s Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), the iodine-painted saint-madman who believes that even the Rage-infected deserve care, tenderness, and perhaps redemption.

Garland’s thesis, consistent since “28 Days Later”, remains bleakly humanist. The infected are terrifying, yes, but they are also predictable. Men, left alone long enough, are not. Jimmy Crystal’s gang of “Fingers,” a Clockwork Orange–inflected cult, are far more disturbing than any alpha zombie. Their violence is ritualized, theatrical, and gleeful, designed not for survival but for domination. O’Connell plays Jimmy with soft-spoken menace, a velvet-voiced devil whose politeness only sharpens the blade. His rotten smile, framed by blond wigs and gold chains, feels less like rebellion than regression, a child playing king at the end of the world.

DaCosta wisely leans into this ugliness. “The Bone Temple” is the most overtly brutal film in the franchise, packed with flayings, crucifixions, and moments of cruelty that border on parody before snapping back into horror. The film is sorely missing some of the heart its predecessor had. Yet the film’s most unsettling idea isn’t its gore, but its suggestion that barbarism may be easier than empathy. Jimmy’s world offers clarity, hierarchy, and permission to indulge the worst instincts. Kelson’s offers uncertainty, grief, and the unbearable labor of care.

Fiennes, acting with zero irony and absolute conviction, anchors the film’s strange moral center. His Ian Kelson is both ridiculous and profound, a doctor who builds cathedrals from bones, dances to Duran Duran with an alpha zombie, and insists on seeing people where others see monsters. His relationship with Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), an infected behemoth rendered momentarily gentle by morphine and music, is absurd, touching, and quietly radical. In a genre defined by flight, Kelson chooses proximity.

Visually, DaCosta departs from Boyle’s jagged immediacy in favor of a more composed, almost ceremonious style. Sean Bobbitt’s cinematography frames horror with unnerving calm, trading chaos for control. It’s a sleeker film, arguably less feral, but also confident in its ability to hold contradictions: laughter and revulsion, sincerity and satire, pop songs and piles of skulls.

And yes, the dancing matters. Zombie movies rarely let bodies move for joy rather than escape. Here movement becomes communion, a refusal to let the end of the world dictate how meaning is made. When “Ordinary World” drifts through the Bone Temple, it’s not a joke so much as a thesis statement.

“28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” is insane, indulgent, and deeply thoughtful. It suggests the genre may be evolving past survival into something stranger: an examination of belief, ritual, and what kind of monsters we choose to become. Long may the zombies dance.

4/5