28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)
Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is difficult to pin down. Filmed back-to-back with its predecessor, this immediate sequel makes no attempt to replicate Danny Boyle’s impressionistic vision. Instead, it strikes out in a different direction entirely, one that’s harder to describe and considerably harder to watch. The result is a film that feels genuinely risky in ways that franchise entries rarely manage.
We begin mere moments after the previous film concluded. Young Spike (Alfie Williams) has been captured by Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), leader of a Satanic cult whose members wear tracksuits and operate in Britain’s infected wastelands. Yes, you read that correctly. It sounds faintly ridiculous on paper, yet O’Connell commits so fully to the role that the absurdity transforms into something genuinely unsettling. Meanwhile, Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) occupies himself in a bunker beneath his monument of human bones, making unexpected discoveries about the infected. Two narratives running parallel. Eventually they converge, though the film shows little interest in conventional structure.
DaCosta demonstrates real confidence here. Where Boyle explored grief through a fairytale lens, The Bone Temple poses a bleaker question: what happens to moral frameworks when civilisation collapses? Not a question that invites optimism. The film doesn’t shy from depicting human cruelty, either. Violence is explicit, filmed without theatrical embellishment, which makes it all the more disturbing. This isn’t spectacle. It’s brutality presented as ordinary fact. Yet scattered throughout this darkness are moments of unexpected tenderness and even humour, particularly in scenes between Fiennes’ eccentric scientist and the infected Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry). These tonal shifts could have derailed the whole enterprise, but somehow they hold.
O’Connell deserves particular praise. His Jimmy Crystal is magnetic in the most troubling way: utterly repellent yet impossible to look away from. The cult itself, with every member bearing some variation of “Jimmy”, operates as a warped reflection of religious devotion. Twisted theology. Ritual violence. The complete package. It prompts uncomfortable thoughts about how easily fear can corrupt social structures into something monstrous.
Fiennes, for his part, brings an odd warmth to a character who has no business being warm. Dr Kelson’s routines (collecting vintage records, obsessively maintaining his bone temple) suggest a man frantically constructing meaning where none exists. The relationship that develops between him and his patient provides the film’s emotional anchor, offering fragments of humanity that contrast sharply with the carnage elsewhere. It’s this relationship, I’d argue, that prevents the film from collapsing under the weight of its own bleakness.
Alex Garland’s screenplay deliberately avoids narrative momentum in favour of atmosphere. Some will find this maddening. Can’t blame them. But it serves the film’s purposes better than conventional plotting would. These characters feel emptied out, which seems entirely intentional. What psychological depth survives 28 years of apocalypse?
On the technical side, the film succeeds admirably. Sean Bobbitt’s cinematography captures both the haunting beauty of the bone temple and the squalor of Jimmy’s domain. The sound design particularly impressed me, using music and ambient noise to generate real disquiet.
The Bone Temple won’t suit all tastes. The graphic content alone guarantees that. Add the fragmented structure and philosophical bent, and you’ve got a film that actively resists easy consumption. But for viewers willing to engage with its darkness, it offers something genuinely distinctive: a meditation on survival, belief, and the fragile boundary between humanity and barbarism. As the middle instalment of a trilogy, it builds genuine anticipation for the conclusion.