Mandible Rising

It was widely praised and landed on some Top 10 lists. Still, I never saw the appeal of last year’s 28 Years Later, the first new film in the “28… Later” genre since 2007, and the return of director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland, who made the original 28 Days Later back in 2002. I thought the 2025 film didn’t do much inventively with the genre; it looked like crud and was repetitive. Watching it led me to believe that there weren’t many places left to go when it came to movies about zombies. However, I did enjoy Ralph Fiennes’ supporting turn as a doctor living in a massive post-apocalyptic boneyard, and the final scene showed some promise.

Now, there’s another sequel, just seven months later, and shot back-to-back with its predecessor. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a huge improvement in almost every way.

Directed by Nia DaCosta, who last made last year’s enjoyable “Hedda Gabler” riff Hedda, the film improves what worked in the last film, while also introducing some compelling ideas. It’s also a much more aesthetically enjoyable picture than the previous film.

The Bone Temple picks up right after the last one ended: It’s still the 30-years-later aftermath of the zombie apocalypse, and the action is set on a remote British island. Spike (Alfie Williams), the orphaned boy from the first film, has joined a group of marauders led by Jimmy (Jack O’Connell), who are dressed in wigs like Jimmy Saville but acting like post-apocalyptic successors to the Droogs from A Clockwork Orange.

Fiennes’ Dr. Ian Kelson is back, still in his massive shrine to the many dead, but now much more likely to toss on records by Duran Duran and have a one-man dance party. He also establishes something of a friendship with “Samson” (Chi Lewis-Parry), the massive, constantly naked “alpha zombie,” who gains back some of his humanity via a series of morphine darts.

There are plenty of the franchise’s trademark zombie kills. But the film’s R rating is earned just as much from full-frontal male nudity as violence and gore. And there’s a flashback of a much younger Samson, although it would have been funnier if he’d been naked in that too, just so we knew which one he was.

The big third-act set piece is the highlight of the film. I won’t give away what happens, except that it doubles as a perhaps unintentional commentary on the Satanic panic of the 1980s, and how a few different entities—from religious zealots to grifters to heavy metal bans—had a shared and vested interest in believing that Satanism was a bigger threat than it really was.