By arriving just six months after the previous instalment, The Bone Temple might have unknowingly set itself up for a fall. Those who weren’t particularly keen on 28 Years Later, and particularly its bizarre cliffhanger, might not like a follow-up that dives headfirst into the cult that were responsible for the last film’s divisive ending. Likewise those who loved 28 Years Later’s visceral direction and imagery might be thrown for a loop now that Nia DaCosta’s taken the reins and made a film very stylistically different to its immediate predecessor.
I was personally in the camp that adored 28 Years Later and all the ideas that it was playing with. It was a full-throttle and emotionally charged cinematic experience that was one of my very favourite films of last year, and I was really excited knowing that a follow-up was coming very soon into the new year. I even got the chance to see The Bone Temple on a double-bill with 28 Years Later, so I got to experience both films back-to-back the way they were shot.
And in doing so, I might’ve indeed set myself up for a fall.
I won’t lie – for the first twenty minutes or so, I was fairly underwhelmed by The Bone Temple. The brilliant and visceral pace that Danny Boyle had established felt like it had ground to a halt, and it seemed nowhere nearly as visually interesting. Jack O’ Connell was brilliant as I’d expected him to be, and Ralph Fiennes was getting some great things to do, all of which he was handling expectedly well, but it felt a lot like the film was biding its time, waiting to do something.
This was certainly not an impression that lasted. The Bone Temple, while not as brilliant as 28 Years Later for me, revealed itself to still be a very strong drama and smartly put-together on a visual and narrative level. Nia DaCosta’s direction is not as in-your-face as Boyle’s (occasionally to the film’s detriment – sometimes the action is begging for his violent and flashy flair), but is much less breakneck, letting the camera settle and allowing the actors to do their thing. This, for the most part, works really well, as 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is rawer and even more focused on humanity than any of the preceding films in this series. Danny Boyle has never liked referring to the 28 Days Later films as ‘zombie movies,’ and Alex Garland’s screenplay for The Bone Temple is the least that this franchise has ever utilised its ‘infected’ in the traditional horror means.
The true monsters here are the Jimmy cult, led by the scenery-chewing concentration of pure evil that is Jack O’ Connell’s Sir Jimmy Crystal. O’ Connell has had a fantastic last year or so, but, my God, Jimmy in this makes Remmick from Sinners look like a saint. You may have thought his monologues there were chilling, but Jimmy Crystal’s warped religious worldview and perverse re-fashioning of the Teletubbies (not to mention his gang’s visual association with a certain disgraced television presenter) is harrowing and squirmish enough, and that’s before you even get to his cult’s acts of supposed ‘charity.’
28 Years Later’s heavy zombie violence and dark themes got it a 15 from the BBFC, where The Bone Temple got pushed up to a 18, and I think that was almost entirely down to one scene around the halfway point which is utterly excruciating. DeCosta’s film isn’t as consistently gore-centric as Boyle’s previous instalment, but what is there is sadistic, stomach-churning and delivered in sinister fashion by the Jimmy cult, a violent gang of tormented hardened killers who just so happen to do Teletubby dances every now and again.
The Bone Temple hones in on the first film’s onslaught of ideas, and focuses in on two specific strands. The first is the Jimmy cult, and the second explores Ralph Fiennes’s Dr Kelson and his interactions with the Alpha of the infected, Samson, who we saw occasionally in the last film causing trouble.
This part of the film is where we truly start to see the underlying themes begin to blossom. 28 Years Later was an amalgam of thoughts about Britain post-Brexit and post-pandemic, while The Bone Temple heavily focuses on religion. As evidenced by the film’s tagline “fear is the new faith,” the Jimmy cult are not your friendly neighbourhood Christians, and Ralph Fiennes’s Dr Kelson is a man who claims to be an atheist motivated by science and progress, but also has death imagery surrounding him at all times and keeps speaking in Latin. Oh, and singing Duran Duran, because who hasn’t confused “her name is Rio and she dances on the sand” for Latin before?
It’s absolute insanity and unbelievably dark, yet strangely hilarious, in no small part due to Ralph Fiennes going all-in on a theatrical performance that works both for the film and in the context of the scene itself.
The simplified narrative on focus on a select few of 28 Years Later’s best elements is a strong move and it helps give The Bone Temple a more humanistic feel, as both the best and worst of humanity is shown – the plight of Dr Kelson in caring for Samson and investigating his infection, and the sadism of the Jimmy cult.
A lot of The Bone Temple’s finer details come through in dialogue. Possibly the film’s best scene from a writing standpoint is a lengthy conversation between Kelson and Jimmy Crystal. Fiennes is certainly leading the charge in this conversation (after all, he’s the straight man to O Connell’s psychopath), but the men discuss religion, memory, and the loss of innocence and identity in the wake of Britain’s fall into a wasteland.
Jimmy is clearly a character of somewhat stunted growth – a lot of his fashion and references that he’s weaved into his own world are references to the British culture of this youth, a culture that stopped dead as soon as the Rage virus started to spread – when he was 8 years old. Kelson, meanwhile, has a record player where he keeps playing his old albums and looking at pictures of a younger him, with a woman we assume is his former partner. Both men are obviously tortured by their pasts, yet they exhibit that in completely different ways. The thematic layers are more simply told here than in 28 Years Later, but no less potent.
The Bone Temple was impressing me, but in ways I hadn’t expected coming off the last film, and I was still feeling a certain sense of whiplash. The aesthetics had completely changed, the directing style had completely changed, and even the evocative unconventional score by Young Fathers had been replaced by a more traditional (though still very strong) soundtrack from composer Hildur Guònadóttir. I was liking a lot of the new elements that DaCosta was bringing in, but I was disappointed that some of my favourite elements of the previous film had been disregarded. Alfie Williams’s Spike is unfortunately sidelined for much of the narrative, the island setting is ignored entirely, and there wasn’t as many audacious setpieces like seeing Spike and his father walk on the causeway to wartime footage, or Spike’s emotional arc resolving itself in the tower of skulls as the sun rises.
That is, of course, until we get to the last twenty minutes where all the themes that Garland’s screenplay and DaCosta’s direction have been exploring come to the forefront in glorious fashion. It’s absolute insanity and unbelievably dark, yet strangely hilarious, in no small part due to Ralph Fiennes going all-in on a theatrical performance that works both for the film and in the context of the scene itself. I know it’s only mid-January, but if there’s any scene in a 2026 film that is more batshit mental than this, I want to see it now. Also, The Bone Temple might have already bagged the award for the best needle-drop of the year.
As for the actual ending, it’s similar to 28 Years Later in that it’s designed to go straight into a third instalment, which we now know is happening. It’s considerably less bonkers than the ending of the last film, but it’s a more subdued and sweet little scene that ties back to the franchise’s history and opens a lot of doors as to where we could go from here.
The Bone Temple, on the surface, was not what I was hoping it to be. Some of my favourite elements from 28 Years Later are absent or frustratingly side-lined to make way for a darker and smaller-scale project. However, when it comes to continuing the last film’s thematic depth and exploring the darkest depths of a post-apocalyptic Britain where society stopped dead in its tracks, it succeeds massively. It’s an accomplished and harrowing genre film with things on its mind, and that is something that has to be appreciated.
My only worry going forward is that, with Danny Boyle taking the directing reins again, the Bone Temple might end up feeling like a strange offshoot in the middle of this new trilogy. Then again, this is a series where every film has been completely different from the last, so I’m sure that Boyle and Garland have a wealth of surprises up their sleeve. And in this current film climate, that’s really exciting indeed.
28 YEARS LATER: BONE TEMPLE IS PLAYING AT UK CINEMAS NATIONWIDE
