The most rewardingly cerebral zombie franchise this side of George Romero evolves once more with an exquisite corpse of a new chapter that picks up where last summer’s “28 Years Later” left off — both in regards to its plot, and also to its abstract focus on the philosophical aspects of post-apocalyptic life — while simultaneously pivoting away from the glitchy sense of grief that settled over the previous film like a burial shroud. Where Danny Boyle’s long-awaited sequel was held taut by the braided relationship between death and denial, Nia DaCosta’s almost immediate follow-up refracts the same existentialist streak into a very different meditation on the search for something to live for.
A strange, hysterical, and thrillingly audacious continuation of a saga about the nature of faith in a godless world, “The Bone Temple” might appear to be a more traditional genre offering than its immediate predecessor, but don’t be fooled by the fact that it wasn’t shot on an iPhone: This is very much the part two that 2025’s smartest and most humane studio horror movie deserves.
Like “28 Years Later,” the emphasis here is less on scariness than it is on the effect of being surrounded by it at all times; while the original “28 Days Later” remains the most terrifying zombie film ever made, the sequel trilogy continues to leverage the “brains, brains, brains!” of its genre towards decidedly more thoughtful ends. Does the mega-donged alpha zombie Samson (returning champion Chi Lewis-Parry) kick things off by ripping some poor bastard’s spine out of his body and feasting on the corpse’s gray matter while the rest of the infected snack on his flesh? Yes. Yes he does. And yet, even in the heat of the moment, “The Bone Temple” makes clear that Samson’s mind is the subject at hand, as Alex Garland’s characteristically intrepid script focuses our attention on the idea that the undead might still be able to think for themselves.
What an interesting wrinkle that would be in a post-apocalyptic England whose human survivors have succumbed to cultishness in a desperate bid for self-preservation — not only because there’s safety in numbers, but also because there’s purpose in theology. The last time we saw “28 Years Later” hero Spike (Alfie Williams), hell’s last surviving mama’s boy was being saved from a horde of infected by a gang of blond-wigged hooligans who all styled themselves after prolific sex monster Jimmy Savile.
“The Bone Temple” begins by looking that salvation in the mouth, as Jimmys leader Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (a magnificent Jack O’Connell, whose sinister performance is touched with the unsettling conviction of child logic) forces the young lad to fight one of his other “fingers” to the death in order to earn his reluctant place in their group. “Jesus!,” Spike’s victim cries out after suffering a fatal stab wound to his leg. Sir Lord Jimmy can’t help but laugh as the teen bleeds out in an abandoned swimming pool: There’s no Jesus here.
Garland is such a committed atheist that he makes Ricky Gervais seem like a man of God by comparison, but — in stark contrast to the former British comedian and current professional whinger — he’s actually curious about our world and the people in it. He’s genuinely interested in the absence and essence of God’s function, and his best writing continues to wrestle with those questions by asking them against the most pitiless environments he can imagine (while his worst writing continues to reverse-engineer a similar uncertainty from the stuff of real life).
Sir Lord Jimmy, however, is not without faith. His father was a vicar who greeted the Rage virus like a vehicle for the rapture (as young Jimmy was forced to see with his own two eyes in the opening minutes of “28 Years Later”), and his lordship has since twisted his childhood trauma into the steadfast belief that his dad was and remains the leader of the undead. The devil himself. Good old St. Nick. He and his impish cult of Satan-worshipping Jimmys have made it their mission to roam the land and offer “charity” to the people they find along the way, which typically means skinning them alive in order to grow his father’s army. (It’s mentioned that Jimmy received some charity of his own before the world went sideways, which is one of several errant details that continues the franchise’s implication that the Rage virus is a form of inherited trauma). It’s important to have something to believe in. Indeed, that might be what makes us human in the first place.
To wit: The other, parallel half of “The Bone Temple” is set at the magnificent ossuary that was first introduced in “28 Years Later,” where the learned and genteel Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) continues to memorialize the forgotten dead. Slathered in iodine and left to his own devices, Kelson is kept alive by his service to those who’ve been killed, and the work has sustained him in body and soul. A far cry from the frightening eccentric he seems from a distance, Kelson might be the most well-preserved adult in all of England, and Fiennes’ eccentric vitality — always vivid, often poignant, sometimes laugh-out-loud hilarious — powers this movie like the hand-cranked record player that Kelson uses to blast Duran Duran and Radiohead LPs in his bunker.
“Everything in its Right Place”? Hardly. But Kelson sees real value in what he does, and that’s enough to make him want to keep doing it, a desire that seems poised to lead the good doctor to a remarkable discovery about this world of gods and monsters as he and Samson develop a morphine-addled rapport. Queasy and depraved as DaCosta’s setpieces can be (the best of which is a barnburner in more than one sense of the word), the probing intimacy of her more “traditional” approach pays its biggest dividends in the frequent scenes where Kelson and Samson get high around the ossuary, as the “Hedda” director combines her bold narrative instincts with her gift for close-up portraiture to throw her characters into sharp relief. It’s spellbinding to watch Kelson and Samson reconnect with their errant humanity from opposite directions; the whole movie takes place in the widening of their eyes as DaCosta fearlessly accepts Garland’s dare to subvert the franchise’s white-knuckle tension in the service of something a lot softer.
’28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’
These movies have always been quick to remind us that people are much scarier than any of the monsters they might be afraid of, and “The Bone Temple” — the least scary yet most disquieting of the lot — is happy to flesh that out on both ends. The infected barely factor into DaCosta’s film, but Jack O’Connell’s Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal is such a demented force of nature that the undead can’t hope to factor as much of a threat. He’s an instantly iconic horror villain who’s as fun to watch as he is necessary to root against, his rolling voice, cracked smile, and purple track suit a costume that allows him to empower the Jimmys with an absolute freedom from fear; one telling scene flips the script on the old genre trope of never splitting up from the group, as the possibly redeemable Jimmy Ink (Erin Kellyman) is confronted by a zombie whose throat she cuts without missing stride.
That posture doesn’t quite excuse “The Bone Temple” of its weirdly timid anticlimax, which resolves several of its storylines with an off-screen shrug and feels all the more dispiriting on the heels of the incredible, showstopping, spontaneous full crowd applause at a January press screening setpiece that tees it up, but I still appreciate that Garland’s script doesn’t fight against itself by artificially pushing the infected to the fore. Nor does it diminish Jimmy’s savagery by entertaining the idea that Spike might warm to his cause. There are more than enough stabbings to keep the bloodhounds at bay. (Kelson blasting “Knives Out” might’ve been a bit too on the nose.)
This movie is structured like an oblivious war for the boy’s immortal soul, or at least for his future, and where the fantastically crass experimentalism of Anthony Dod Mantle’s “28 Years Later” cinematography helped convey how raw and uncertain the world felt to Spike when he left the shelter of Holy Island, Sean Bobbitt’s (almost) equally artful but less aggressive lensing allows this movie to register as the unyielding stuff of Spike’s new reality.
Going back is no longer an option for him, and going forward — whatever that will mean in the sequel teased at the end of this one — will force him to reckon with the perils of self-preservation, which this franchise continues to see as both the cornerstone of society as well as its inevitable undoing. Having something to live for can be a dangerous thing, but nobody can survive for long out there without one.
Grade: B+
Sony Pictures Releasing will release “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” in theaters on Friday, January 16.
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