28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

Nia Dacosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple directly takes off from where Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later (2025) left off. The setting is quarantined Britain, 28 full years after the Rage Virus — a mutated strain that transformed its victims into hyperaggressive zombie-like creatures — tore through the continent in 28 Days Later (2002). Few humans have survived. Young Spike (Alfie Williams) leaves the sheltered isle after the death of his cancer-riddled mother (Jodie Comer) to “come of age” on his own terms in the zombie-infested mainland. This film opens with him getting roped into the weird ‘gang’ that rescued him at the end of the last film — except they turn out to be a toxic Satanic cult run by a psychopath named Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Sinners’ Jack O’Connell). Spike is too scared to escape the Jimmys, a group that spends their days skinning and killing survivors as a sacrifice to the devil. Parallely, a lonely Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who urged Spike to find his own way, forges an unlikely bond with Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), the Alpha leader who terrorised them not too long ago. It’s apparent that, at some point, the paths of the iodine-smothered orange-skinned doctor and a Jimmy’d Spike will cross. What’s not apparent is how a post-apocalyptic zombie thriller can be unexpectedly funny and profound at once: not spoofy-Shaun of the Dead funny, more like Tarantino-Spike-Lee-revisionism funny.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple comes within a year of its predecessor’s release, with both films being shot back-to-back. Directed commendably by Nia DaCosta, this is the fourth film in the 28 Days Later franchise that started back in 2003 with Danny Boyle at the helm as the director with a script conceptualized by Alex Garland who has also written the last two 28 Years Later films.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is an unsettling, often punishing sequel that connects directly and deliberately to Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later (2025), while escalating the franchise’s visual and thematic intensity. Where Boyle’s film found terror in suggestion and absence (screams heard but not seen, horror registered in the faces of those left behind) director Nia DaCosta brings that terror into full view. Violence is explicit, gore is confrontational and discomfort is sustained rather than fleeting.