‘28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’ review: A powerful, punishing sequel

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.

Written once again by Alex Garland, this instalment functions as a continuation, picking up narrative threads almost immediately from its predecessor. The world it depicts is not merely broken but lawless—a forgotten, ungoverned corner of Britain where authority has evaporated and anything can happen. That sense of abandonment permeates the film’s design, from secure hamlets trying to survive unnoticed to abandoned buildings and ritualistic enclaves operating beyond any moral or social constraint.

The film’s 109 minutes are built around two sharply juxtaposed forces. The first is Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), a withdrawn, compassionate figure haunted by loss. Kelson has devoted himself to the construction of the Bone Temple, a vast ossuary memorial to those consumed by the Rage Virus. These sequences are among the film’s most affecting, elevated by careful art direction and cinematography that renders death with an unsettling reverence. Set against an unexpected, Duran Duran–heavy soundtrack, Kelson’s quiet routines and his tentative bond with an Alpha infected, whom he names Samson, introduce a fragile humanity into an otherwise forbidding landscape.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), a grotesque, Teletubbies-inspired, Satan-worshipping man-child who, having survived the Rage Virus, now rules over a tiny cult of followers -- all survivors who he rechristens Jimmy (Jimmy Ink, Jimmy Snake, Jimmima etc) -- through noise, cruelty and murderous pageantry. At the opening of 28 Years Later, a young Jimmy Crystal is watching children’s television moments before seeing his father turn into an infected zombie who experiences a brutal death. Crystal embodies the film’s vision of post-collapse leadership: childish, violent and nihilistic. O’Connell’s performance is deliberately excessive, reinforcing the franchise’s theme that humanity itself is often the greater threat.

Returning character Spike (Alfie Williams) feels less central this time around, with both the role and performance lacking the emotional weight they carried in the previous film. As the narrative grows more fragmented and extreme, Spike doesn’t often shape events but simply reacts to them.

Technically, The Bone Temple is striking. It’s graphic, disturbing and frequently exhausting, but also ambitious and carefully constructed. DaCosta builds on the foundations laid by Boyle and Garland, while pushing the series into stranger, harsher territory.

The film reaches its apex in a powerful climactic sequence within the Bone Temple, a literal architecture of death. It’s an exhilarating scene where Fiennes sheds Kelson’s control and quiet Kelson to an Iron Maiden song.

As with 28 Years Later, the film ends by introducing (or reintroducing) a character, clearly setting the stage for what follows and underlining its role as a connecting chapter. The graphic violence and tone of The Bone Temple will not work for everyone, yet it remains a purposeful sequel, pushing the franchise forward.

Udita Jhunjhunwala is a Goa-based critic and curator.