28 Years Later: The Bone Temple Is Sometimes Poetic, But Too Often Sadistic

Ah, the English countryside, a place of verdant Arthurian forests, bizzing bees, and fast-moving zombies driven by some nameless need to feast upon human flesh. That was the world of Danny Boyle’s elegiac, if occasionally grisly, 28 Years Later, the director’s 2025 resuscitation of the franchise he and screenwriter Alex Garland kicked off in 2002 with 28 Days Later. It’s also the world of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, which was written by Garland but helmed by another director, Nia DaCosta. The two pictures were filmed back-to-back, which means they merge into a farily graceful whole, and sections of The Bone Temple are either earnestly poetic or staggeringly entertaining, or both. Still, there’s something off-balance about this entry in the franchise. The Bone Temple is part satisfying triumph, part missed opportunity, and its pluses and minuses bump against one another in jangly discord.

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The marvelous child actor Alfie Williams returns as 12-year-old Spike, who, in the earlier film, survived a zombie-hunting trip with his father, only to chafe at his father’s lack of feeling for his exceedingly ill wife, Spike’s mother. Near the end of 28 Years Later, Spike and his mother manage to make their way into the majestic and mournful territory of loner physician Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who spends his days avidly studying the “infected,” as the zombies are called, as well as building magnificent towers of bleached skulls, femurs, tibias, and the like to honor every victim of the country’s seemingly ineradicable zombiepocalypse. Kelson guides Spike’s terminally ill mother to a graceful death, and shows him how to honor her memory. At the end of the film, Spike sets out on his own mission, but he’s beset by zombies. A messianic weirdo accompanied by a ragtag band of lookalikes saves him. The Bone Temple begins with Spike’s initiation into this unsavory group, and that’s where the movie’s problems begin, too.

Jack O’Connell plays the gang’s leader, Jimmy Crystal, a psychopath with wavy blond tresses and rotten teeth, his inching-toward-middle-age bod girdled by a purple velour tracksuit adorned with gold chains. Jimmy’s crew of knife-toting teenage followers wear matching towheaded wigs over their shaven pates. Together, they roam the countryside, terrorizing the locals almost as much as the infected do. They put Spike to a test—he must kill one of the other members in order to join the group, and though he squeaks by on a technicality, he manages to do so. Thus he becomes one of Jimmy’s “seven fingers,” all named Jimmy and all bound to follow this charismatic maniac’s orders, which are ostensibly divined from Satan, though they clearly originate in his own cracked noggin. Spike, brave but sensitive, is miserable as a Jimmy, but he has no choice. Only one fellow Jimmy, Jimmy Ink (Erin Kellyman), seems clued in to Jimmy Crystal’s insanity, and only she connects with Spike’s suffering.

Meanwhile, in a meadow located who-knows-where (the geography of The Bone Temple is a bit murky), Fiennes’ Kelson goes about his usual business of bleaching the bones of corpses and adding them to his cathedral of memory: its multiple towers stretch high into the sky, framed against starry skies and cloud-studded ones, like a macabre Emerald City. Instead of whistling while he works, he warbles Duran Duran tunes like “Rio” and “Girls on Film.” This is the music of his youth, a relic of the “before” times, and in the evenings, he retreats to his underground lair, where he plays selections from his modest stack of LPs on an old record player. Kelson, his skin turned orange from iodine (he’s learned it can protect him from zombie infection), his eyes eternally haunted, is very, very lonely. No wonder he’s eager to befriend a strapping but wounded alpha zombie who has veered into his territory. He helps the injured zombie, sedates him with a hit or two of morphine, and nicknames him Samson. (This gentle giant is played, with grunting gravitas, by Chi Lewis-Parry.) The two find accord. Kelson learns that the zombies retain some of their human memories. You could build a whole movie, perhaps a pretty great one, around this chunk of The Bone Temple—but it probably wouldn’t satisfy modern audience’s idea of what a horror movie ought to be.

O’Connell’s Jimmy Crystal and his gruesome gang serve that function. The zombie violence in The Bone Temple is cartoonish and routine: you’ll see heads being ripped off bodies and eyeballs being gouged out—you know, the regular stuff. But the sequences featuring Jimmy Crystal and his goons are far more sadistic, and needlessly unpleasant. Jimmy, at the behest of the almighty one he calls Old Nick, commands his moppet followers to engage in various acts of brutality, including skinning their victims alive. DaCosta and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle are relatively discreet in how they present these grim visions. But there’s plenty of agonized screaming, as well as lots of closeups of terrified faces. The sadism is pronounced and fetishized rather than fleeting, bordering on torture porn. It’s almost as if someone on this filmmaking team had worried that without these excruciating interludes, the whole affair might be too tame and poetic.

The filmmaking overall isn’t the problem: DaCosta takes care in both building and releasing dramatic tension, and Mantle wrings plenty of dignity out of rolling green fields and red-hot flames leaping high into the sky. Yet The Bone Temple both builds on the promise of the earlier movie and betrays it. O’Connell is terrific, but both his character and his performance are badly served by the prolonged savagery of certain scenes. Instead of feeling beguiled, I kept wishing I could get away.

But never while Fiennes is onscreen. He’s both the star and the heart of The Bone Temple. With his sunburned, iodine-tinged face, his gaunt frame draped in tattered leftovers from a lost era, he’s the picture of a man who’s on the cusp of going wild. Yet he clings to any shred of civilization he can find, including lyrics like “Lipstick cherry all over the lens as she’s falling.” At one point Fiennes’ Kelson, in his lonely lair, glances at a snapshot he’s pinned to his wall. In it, he sees a younger version of himself, standing next to a cute blonde in a New Wave haircut. Those pre-zombie-invasion times were fun and carefree; we had no idea how good we had it. The Bone Temple urges us not just to think about all the dumb stuff we leave behind as the culture moves on, but to find glory in it. In 28 Years Later, Fienne’s Kelson explained to young Spike the meaning of the phrase memento mori. In The Bone Temple, he breathes life into the concept; we must remember that someday we’ll be dust. But that stupid song lyric? That will endure long after we’ve collectively forgotten everything else. It’s part of what makes us feel alive, while we are.