RATING
Director(s): Nia DaCosta
Country: United States
Author: Alex Garland
Actor(s): Jack O’Connell, Alfie Willians, Connor Newall
Written by Tom Augustine
Dr Ian Kelson, Ralph Fiennes’ wise and kind-hearted supporting player in last year’s masterful 28 Years Later, is the kind of performance that invites the film around it to bend to its will. Before Kelson’s appearance, Danny Boyle’s return to the iconic zombie series of the early 2000s had already served as a shot in the arm for the British auteur, and the zombie genre that the original, 28 Days Later, had shaken up so confidently in 2002. But Fiennes, a consistently remarkable (and consistently unrecognised) performer, injected such gravitas to his sequences across from young lad Spike (Alfie Williams) and his mother Isla (Jodie Comer) that the film took on new, profound contours. Kelson’s construction, the titular Bone Temple, a monument to the many, many dead and a physical reminder of the good doctor’s philosophy of memento mori (‘remember, you must die’) is a stunning, gothic piece of set design, but the placement of Kelson within it, arguably the moral centre of this ravaged world, allowed for 28 Years Later to become one of the most emotionally pulverising and surprising works of genre cinema in years. Boyle and writer Alex Garland’s ambition with the new (proposed) trilogy maintains the original film’s aggressive strangeness and raw, lo-fi flourish — but the original film also contains a vivid streak of humanism and earnest feeling, all too easily overlooked. It makes perfect sense, then, that Kelson forms the heart of The Bone Temple, the middle chapter of this new trilogy.
Fitting for a series of such surprising capabilities, the middle entry, now helmed by American filmmaker Nia DaCosta (whose Hedda, in 2025, was an accomplished drama that drew career-best work from star Tessa Thompson) doesn’t function in the way we’ve come to expect the progression of a trilogy to behave. Where one might expect a series to expand outward with each successive entry, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple constricts, retaining laser focus on a small retinue of key players over the course of a few days within a very small radius of space — a rolling overhead shot reminds us just how close in proximity the action taking place elsewhere is to Kelson’s temple. A blessing and a curse, that small scale can feel like something of a comedown after the immensity of 28 Years Later, which wielded the frisson of the new as it introduced us to a Britain that has been frozen in time, walled off by the appearance of the ‘Rage’ virus — a perverted mirror-image of post-Brexit Britain, with its provincial isolationism and masculine posturing. But it also allows for the psychological ideas at play to flourish, Boyle and Garland’s grand-scale inquiries into faith, humanity and death given uncommon room to breathe.
The middle entry in the iconic zombie series’ new trilogy substitutes Danny Boyle’s mosaic hyperactivity for Nia DaCosta’s solid, workmanlike inquiries into faith, humanity and the nature of death. It’s a smaller, subtler film than its predecessor, but one packed with genuine moments of profundity, particularly in sequences revolving around Ralph Fiennes’ heroic good doctor Kelson.
The unexpected appearance at the end of 28 Years Later of the ‘Jimmies’, a band of blonde wig-sporting, tracksuited zombie-hunters led by Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) that called to mind Jimmy Saville, was an unexpected tonal shift for the ages, an example of the way in which this series confidently changes course on a whim, expecting you to follow. It is this band of violent psychopaths that form the yin to Kelson’s yang in The Bone Temple, the ideological clash between the two parties the film’s entire focus. Spike, having lit out on his own to find his destiny, quickly comes under the guidance of Jimmy Crystal, becoming one of his ‘Fingers’, who he uses to dispense a kind of Satanic justice on living and infected alike. Crystal is the preacher’s son we met in the harrowing opening sequence of 28 Days Later, who witnessed his father referring to the infection as the ‘day of judgement’. In the years since, Crystal has become convinced that he is the son of ‘Old Nick’, also known as Satan, and that he and his troupe of indoctrinated youngsters are in Hell, dispensing ‘charity’ in the form of sadistic acts of torture to whomever they come across. The cartoonish villainy of O’Connell forms a compelling counterpoint to the gentleness of Kelson, who continues to experiment on Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), the exceedingly well-endowed ‘Alpha’ zombie who the doctor can see inklings of consciousness forming within. Something akin to a friendship forms between the two, as Kelson identifies the unrelenting pain that the infected feel and delivers ‘peace and respite’ to Samson through the use of morphine, allowing him to explore the properties of the infection further.
Inevitably, these two parties will unite, but in ways so bizarre and unexpected that to spoil them here would be a shame. Suffice to say, if it seems like The Bone Temple is quite clearly establishing an angel on one of Spike’s shoulders and a devil on the other, well, that’s true, but it’s also far more complicated than that. O’Connell, so compelling in 2025’s Sinners, delivers a superb villain turn, full of eccentricity and menace. The depiction of the Jimmies, with their gleeful dispensing of horrors, is perhaps a little played out in a post-Game of Thrones world, but O’Connell maintains interest for long enough that the meeting of Crystal and Kelson midway through the film provides some of the series’ most rewarding, emotionally gratifying material. The sequences between Kelson and Samson, meanwhile, are practically joyous, and also something I don’t think I’ve seen before in a zombie film — what if the condition of being a zombie could be cured? What would that even look like? Garland, whose hammer-blunt scripting has always been a mixed-bag, continues to thrive within the world of Later, even if some of his worst indulgences are less ironed-out by DaCosta’s rock-solid, craftsmanlike direction than Boyle’s madcap, ‘throw everything at the wall and see what sticks’ approach. It is, in a sense, a more straightforward entry in the series, readily calling to mind the underrated 28 Weeks Later, which also subbed out Boyle for a less prominent filmmaker before again returning the original visionary to the helm (as Boyle has promised to do for a hypothetical part three). DaCosta is doubtlessly talented, and her focus on drama and performance deliver minor but distinct pleasures throughout The Bone Temple, arriving at a climax of such mind-boggling properties that Boyle’s name can be comfortably invoked as a comparison. It’s a sequence of cartoonish near-goofiness that practically dares you to disregard it, to not take it seriously. This has been the 28 Days Later series’ approach throughout — pushing through silliness into utter transcendence, hoping you’re on board all the while. Once again, an entry in the series pulls it off, and then some. Bring on part three.
Sentimental Value is in cinemas now.