28 Years Later: The Bone Temple review: beguilingly wild and tender

SPOILERS ahead for Danny Boyle’s 2025 film, 28 Years Later.

Where in the cursed UK will 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple lead us next?

After all, whatever expectations folks had going into 28 Years Later, last year’s belated continuation of the apocalyptic story first spun by director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland in 2002’s 28 Days Later, were torn apart like an unsuspecting soul blundering into a swarm of fast-acting zombies.

A Rage virus-fuelled fever dream of spectacular contortions, it spliced real-life wartime newsreel with Laurence Olivier’s rousing, 1944 directorial debut, Henry V, Rudyard Kipling’s poem, Boots, and err, the equally unsettling Teletubbies. And that wasn’t the half of 28 Years Later’s unruly magnificence. Prima Facie star Jodie Comer delivered a performance for the ages as a mum whose mind is consumed by cancer in an age when all medical assistance is long gone.

Conclave’s Ralph Fiennes similarly astounded as the blood-red, iodine-smeared Doctor Kelson. Unable to heal the sick, he instead committed to granting them an eternity in his austere ossuary that lends this latest franchise entry its name.

Chi-Lewis Parry’s horse-hung alpha Samson opened eyes, then there was that whack-a-doodle cliffhanger, as brave young lad Spike (Alfie Williams) found himself rescued (?) from a clamour of the infected by a parkouring gang of track-suited ninjas. Each of whom appears to model themselves after the despicable abuser, Jimmy Saville, whose outing as a paedophile occurred after the in-continuity fall of Britain depicted herein.

How do you top all of that?

Watch the trailer for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

The Bone Temple: beyond the wasteland

Expect the unexpected all over again. Once more penned by Garland, this time the directorial reins have been passed to Nia DaCosta, who breathed fresh life into 2021’s Candyman sequel and takes both beautiful and terrifying swings here.

Turns out Spike isn’t all that saved. After creeping us out with his insidious Irish jigging vampire, Remmick, in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, Jack O’Connell is at it again as Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, the leader of this feral band of blond bewigged, fake gold chain-sporting psychopaths – all with a hint of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange droogs.

They scour the country looking for survivors to mutilate in sacrifice to Old Nick. Yup, the young lad from the prologue of 28 Years Later has been unsurprisingly traumatised by his late vicar father embracing the rapture. He believes that the rage virus is not science-born, but instead Satan’s curse – hoo boy.

Jimmy Crystal’s Fingers, the seven Jimmies that make up his marauding gang, include The Green Knight’s Erin Kellyman, the most pragmatic of the lot, and The Brutalist’s Emma Laird who, while dinky cute in faerie wings, manages to make the Teletubbies dance even more disturbing than it already was with her jittery chaos.

As Spike, Novocastrian Williams, 15, is an innately gifted emerging performer. His panicked eyes simultaneously convey the debilitating fear of his murderous new company, the dimming windows of escape, and the young archer’s desperate determination to get through this. A wiliness that sees him best a much bigger lad when forced into a knife fight to the death in the desiccated ghost of a once-fun swimming pool with flumes.

Jimmy Crystal surveys all from his anti-lifeguard’s throne, casually chuckling at the blood-spurting loss of one of his fingers, offered up to Old Nick, whom he hears in his head as his dead dad. He’s equally delighted by the recruitment of a new blade in Spike.

The Bone Temple: music of the night

Given this dramatic set up, you might think that director DaCosta is going to lean harder into the horror of this wasteland, and you’d be right – she does. The mythologically grand visions of 28 Years Later give way to a more caustically grim embrace: there’s even more graphic behead-and-spine-ings by Samson, who here snacks on pulpy brains, as is a zombie’s wont.

He also goes toe-to-territorial-toe with fellow Ragers, while the Jimmies flay away, offering their twisted brand of “charity” in this hellish world with its monstrous echoes of Christopher Eccleston’s soldiers in Boyle’s 2002 original. Good folks go up in flames every bit as much as the villains who surrender their souls on the pyre of this ashen world.

But once again, we’ll land on astonishingly incongruous, wildly beguiling tenderness.

Parry delivers a remarkable physical performance, conveying so much in the heft of his swollen, vein-mottled shoulders and the darting of his red-raw eyes, a broken mirror reflection of Williams’ wanderer who once, too, was a frightened young man.

The evolution of Parry’s Samson ensures this hulking beast is smart enough to embrace the temporary respite his clamouring mind receives via Kelson’s tranquiliser darts.

Becoming addicted to that calm leads to perhaps the least expected stoner bro bonding moment in cinematic history, set to the tune of a Duran Duran banger first heard whispered in a folksy rendition by the good Doctor Kelson. Neither of these men, however different, has felt a tender touch in decades, so the slimmest possibility of connection breaks our hearts. It’s genius.

As is Fiennes. As towering a talent as we have (perhaps always), he’s equally adept at comedy as he is at drama, balancing both to perfection here, flipping between modes in a heartbeat. We give a damn about Kelson, his monumental temple to humanity’s endurance and his concern, more for Samson than himself, that the drugs won’t last.

We also care about Alfie and the strange sibling bond building between him and Kellyman’s Jimmy Ink. These survivors matter. They aren’t just grist in the guts and organ mill.

Irish actor O’Connell’s Scottish accent is almost perfect, with a mispronunciation of where he’s supposedly from allowed when a turn’s this deliciously twisted. As with the greatest villains, there’s even a shred of empathy for who he might have been in less disastrous circumstances, with his last line in this chapter wholly magnificent in its unholiness.

The Bone Temple: hope remains

A nimble director, DaCosta is laser-focused on the might of what remains, working with the healing power of music as Garland’s screenplay dances in these shifting sands.

Lifted up on the shoulders of Hildur Guðnadóttir’s haunting score, the film’s astonishing gore and cinematographer Sean Bobbitt’s magic – catching glinting light through wheat fields and a glimmer of hope even as the night burns in fire and brimstone – one at last wonders:

Is it possible to pray for a way back from the brink?

That shimmering promise, even as we stand knee-deep in the skulls that litter this ruined world, is majestic filmmaking at its finest.

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