28 Years Later: The Bone Temple explores the legacy of shared trauma on the national psyche
Few long-running horror franchises manage to feel both expansive and intimate. The Bone Temple, the second film in a projected trilogy revisiting the world of classic British horror 28 Days Later, achieves exactly that balance.
The Bone Temple is a brilliant example of a well-told, powerful yet small-scale story operating confidently within the parameters of an existing franchise. With this film, American film-maker Nia DaCosta takes the directorial reins from Danny Boyle and puts her unique stamp on the series. Working from writer Alex Garland’s screenplay, she has created a wonderfully off-kilter, wild horror film about survival and the legacy of shared trauma on the national psyche.
In the world of the franchise, Britain has been overrun with the hyper-contagious “rage” virus, resulting in hordes of violent infected.
Garland and Boyle changed the zombie genre forever in 28 Days Later (2002) by making the traditionally shambling creatures fast-moving and aggressive. This newest film follows the example set by the first film by asserting that the most immediate threat following the collapse of civilisation may not be the zombies themselves but fellow survivors, irrevocably altered by the breakdown of society.
Returning from the excellent, bracing 28 Years Later (2025) are teenage Spike (Alfie Williams) and former GP Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes). The hauntingly beautiful and brilliantly conceived bone temple of the title is Kelson’s monumental construction, first revealed in 28 Years Later. It’s a sprawling series of obelisks made from the bones of the dead, created as a memorial to the loss of British life.
In the last film’s most memorable and impressive scene, Spike ascends a tower of skulls to place and memorialise the remains of his mother (Jodie Comer). The act signifies a cultural commemoration and a momentary acknowledgement of grief and mourning that is usually unavailable to survivors living with uncertainty.
The Bone Temple follows two stories that converge inevitably and explosively in a startling climax. In the first, Kelson forms an unexpected bond with the “Alpha” – an infected man he names Samson – and the discoveries he makes about the rage virus in the process. The other follows Spike’s encounter with the group of survivors called The Jimmys, named and styled by their leader Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) after British celebrity Jimmy Savile.
Sporting Savile’s trademark tracksuit, platinum blonde wig and gold chains, the group are trained in martial arts. Crystal is convinced he is the offspring of Satan – as teased in the superbly baffling final minutes of the previous film.
Savile, the formerly well-loved presenter of Jim’ll Fix It – the BBC programme that delivered life-changing experiences to needy children – was revealed to be a serial child sex offender in 2012, a year after his death. In the film’s world, where society collapsed in 2002, Savile is still an apparently charitable if eccentric personality.
It is deeply unsettling and uncomfortably humorous seeing his tarnished image animated so aggressively in acts of extreme violence. A version of his catchphrase “Howzat!” is uttered by the group in cultish reverence.
Through The Jimmys and their peculiarly brutal, ritualised existence, DaCosta’s tragic film is concerned with the psychological effect of collective trauma and suffering.
DaCosta’s brilliance
DaCosta has spoken about Garland and Boyle’s encouragement that she take creative control and put her stamp on the material, and about her attitude to making this film as “letting her freak flag fly”.
She has certainly delivered on that promise. This is a brilliantly strange film that is continuously surprising and provocative despite its small-scale storytelling.
I would be surprised if anything else at the cinema in 2026 can match the bizarre spectacle of The Bone Temple’s best sequence. In a tour de force of over-the-top theatrics that is as joyously silly as it is visionary, Fiennes gives a career highlight performance, complemented by pyrotechnics and set to the searing riffs of Iron Maiden’s heavy metal anthem The Number of the Beast.
DaCosta’s treatment of location plays a key role in defining the eerie, unsettling character of The Bone Temple. While the director’s father is British-born and raised and she visited the UK regularly during her childhood, as an American she brings an outside perspective and sense of wonder to the northern British rural landscape.
Where 28 Days Later gained its critical reputation from the melancholy uncanniness of dilapidated urban spaces fallen into disrepair, this film is set entirely in the lush, dramatic pastoral environments of Cumbria.
DaCosta intersperses the action of the film with deeply unsettling, atmospheric shots of the countryside. The choice recalls the mythic strangeness of influential folk horror films Witchfinder General (1968) and The Wicker Man (1973).
More so than any other film genre, horror pushes boundaries and it must evolve to stay relevant and potent. DaCosta and Garland follow that ethos and have crafted a continuously surprising, spiky and abrasive take on familiar elements of folk horror and the zombie film.
The Bone Temple stands proudly within the recent wave of acclaimed horror films including Weapons and Bring Her Back as a bold and original experience that genre fans will celebrate.
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Matt Jacobsen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.