28 Years and a Bit Years Later, as 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple was never going to be called. It’s the 2026 sequel to 2025’s 28 Years Later, which came 18 years after 28 Weeks Later, and it started shooting as soon as Danny Boyle had handed over to his replacement and handed the keys to the director’s mobile cabin to new arrival Nia DaCosta.
It’s the second of three, so there’s one more to come, with Boyle back in charge. Be warned, this second one won’t work as a standalone, or barely. Do yourself a favour and watch 28 Years Later first – you can skip Days and Weeks, if all you’re after is a sense of what’s what.
What’s what is that we’re still in the woods in the far north of England, where zombies – more precisely those infected with the Rage Virus – are still roaming in packs, with the occasional bigger, stronger, smarter Alpha in the mix. They’re the ones to be really afraid of, though more frightening still are the humans exploiting the situation. The followers of Sir Jimmy Crystal (Brits will recognise this as a version of notorious sex criminal and DJ Sir Jimmy Savile) are on a mission with their messianic madman leader to do appalling things to any of the non-infected they encounter. When not skinning people alive or indulging in other acts of unspeakable cruelty they fight each other to the death, or whatever Sir Jimmy (an eye-rolling Jack O’Connell in blond wig and jingle-jangle jewellery) – who claims to be the son of “Old Nick” – commands.
Also out there is Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), covered in iodine, which acts as some kind of zombie repellent, and running around in a loin cloth, listening to Duran Duran while he constructs his “bone temple” out of the remnants of the many human corpses that scatter the countryside.
Though he looks like Old Ben Gunn from Treasure Island, Kelson is on the side of civilisation and is investigating ways of negating the effects of the virus, by drugging an Alpha he names Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) and attempting to communicate with him. On the other side the forces of chaos represented by Sir Jimmy and his pack, all also called Jimmy (among them Jimmy Shite, Jimmy Ink, Jimmy Jimmy and the one girl, Jimmima). And in the middle Spike (Alfie Williams), who you’ll remember from the first 28 Years Later, a resourceful normal kid just trying to save alive.
Writer Alex Garland is 100 per cent onside with civilisation, as the whole franchise has been, with Fiennes’s eccentric Dr Kelson held up as the imperfect repository of what wisdom remains in this benighted land. Garland goes to great lengths to point out how awful life would be, especially for the young, the weak and the old, if things really went back to the days of yore – the dirt, the chaos, the dark and the exposure to malevolence, should it wish to start in with its tricks.
Elegiac zombie films are rare – Jeremy Gardner’s excellent The Battery from 2012 springs to mind – but that’s the line that DaCosta is taking. Though never exactly exciting – unless you like mutilation and torture – this is a fascinating film, which somehow flies along though not much is happening. The secret sauce is the way it’s cut together, which is poetic, DaCosta and editor Jake Roberts opting for a far less frenzied tone than Danny Boyle, which composer Hildur Guðnadóttir emphasises with a score that’s almost wistful at times.
Other musical choices add a touch of humour and poppy counterpoint – the use of Duran Duran, most civilised of the New Romantics, plus Radiohead’s Everything in Its Right Place, and, in the film’s crunch (and funny) scene, Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast, when the Jimmys meet the good doctor.
Ralph Fiennes dancing like a heavy metal dervish is one of the film’s high points. What a loose an uninhibited actor he has become in his later years.
Er, that’s enough to be getting along with, surely? Looking forward to the next one!
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
