{"id":408890,"date":"2026-01-15T14:14:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-15T14:14:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/408890\/"},"modified":"2026-01-15T14:14:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-15T14:14:07","slug":"28-years-later-the-bone-temple-is-the-perfect-franchise-bridge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/408890\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201828 Years Later: The Bone Temple\u2019 Is the Perfect Franchise Bridge"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nia DaCosta\u2019s quick-turnaround follow-up to \u201828 Years Later\u2019 comes with the weight of high standards and franchise-laden expectations, but it lives up to both. How\u2019s that?<\/p>\n

Danny Boyle\u2019s 28 Years Later was probably the most pleasant moviegoing surprise of 2025<\/a>: a grandly scaled, genuinely lyrical horror film that doubled smartly as a post-Brexit allegory. The central image of the narrow, partially submerged causeway<\/a> linking the tidal island of Lindisfarne to the rest of the U.K. broadly evoked a nation\u2019s isolationist impulses while also suggesting the desire, tenuous and terrified, to reach out and connect. Working with longtime collaborators Alex Garland and Anthony Dod Mantle\u2014whose soulful screenplay and virtuosic, iPhone-based cinematography, respectively, represented some of the best work of both men’s careers\u2014Boyle etched an indelible portrait of the British Empire after sunset, a future-shock vision of a post-pandemic society RETVRNING to its medieval roots.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s strange to think that Boyle integrated Taylor Holmes\u2019s anxious reading of Rudyard Kipling\u2019s poem \u201cBoots\u201d into his film\u2019s editing rhythms only after clocking its effectiveness<\/a> in the trailer<\/a>; the organizing postmodern principle of 28 Years Later is what it looks like when cultural and political history collapse in on themselves and what gets salvaged from the wreckage. The harrowing adventures of 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams)\u2014born into a twilight zone and bridling against the warrior birthright bestowed by his father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson)\u2014are juxtaposed against coming-of-age tropes \u00e0 la The Road, all in the service of a morbid poeticism. The extended passages set at the gleaming ossuary known as the Bone Temple\u2014the life\u2019s work of iodine-slathered survivor Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes)\u2014effectively shifted a series previously content to stylishly cannibalize and regurgitate George A. Romero into existential territory. \u201cMemento amoris,\u201d whispers the good doctor to Spike after humanely euthanizing the kid\u2019s mother, Isla (Jodie Comer). Persuasively preaching the sanctity of love in a movie that also depicts a massive, stark-naked rage zombie ripping out his victims\u2019 spines is no mean feat.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The same goes for positioning Jimmy Savile<\/a> and the Teletubbies as enduring British cultural signifiers, especially considering the incongruity for a North American audience. It takes guts these days to keep things so specific. 28 Years Later\u2019s cliff-hanger climax, stranding Spike with a pack of tracksuited sociopaths presided over by the chavvy Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O\u2019Connell), edged all the way to the precipice of unintentional comedy and bad taste\u2014healthy signs of a creative team willing to take risks.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s in this same leap-of-faith spirit that American director Nia DaCosta steps in to join Boyle and his merry band for The Bone Temple, a swiftly produced and satisfyingly worthy sequel that recognizes its status as a bridge\u2014a third film has been tentatively green-lit\u2014while succeeding on its own pressurized and self-contained terms. With Dod Mantle swapped out for Sean Bobbitt and Boyle pulling producer duty, the strongest connective presence between the two films is Garland, whose script is, once again, a marvelous balancing act of suggestion and substance. Clearly, the rage virus brings out the best in him: In The Bone Temple, he cleverly knots his own most precariously dangling loose ends while cultivating a set of even wilder enigmas to meditate on until the next installment.\u00a0<\/p>\n

More on \u201928 Years Later\u2019 <\/p>\n

More on \u201928 Years Later\u2019 <\/p>\n

The wild card is DaCosta, a talented but uneven director coming off a desultory tour of duty for Marvel (2023\u2019s The Marvels) and the ambitious Henrik Ibsen adaptation Hedda, which played the festival circuit last fall before getting lost in the streaming shuffle. The Bone Temple may be a job for hire, but DaCosta understands the assignment. Instead of academicizing the material as in her intelligent but underwhelming 2021 revision of Candyman<\/a>, she grinds it\u2014steadily and gleefully\u2014into a bloody pulp. The results are lean but meaty, with plenty of marrow to extract from the rotted ivory tower.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s one thing that Garland likes\u2014a fascination verging on a fetish\u2014it\u2019s tight-knit bands of brothers. The camouflage-clad soldiers selling the heroes on a disingenuous sense of sanctuary in 28 Days Later spawned a series of successors in Annihilation, Civil War, and Warfare The Bone Temple tweaks the template by focusing on Sir Jimmy Crystal\u2019s roving, blond-wigged marauders, recalibrating them from their previous status as an unlikely (if unsettling) deus ex machina into complex avatars for how bad times give rise to cults of personality. We already know from 28 Years Later that O\u2019Connell\u2019s character was a child during the onset of the rage virus and that his last glimpse of his father\u2014a rural pastor\u2014was as a demon seemingly leading a horde of infected through his local church. The upshot is that Sir Lord Jimmy has styled himself as a kind of Antichrist, recruiting followers by claiming direct communication with \u201cOld Nick.\u201d\u00a0 His rhetoric for seeking out and slaughtering uninfected civilians is that the devil is making him do it; meanwhile, he keeps his followers in line\u2014and their lethal skills sharp\u2014by occasionally offering potential victims a chance to join the group by killing and replacing one extant member.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s via this diabolical management style that Spike becomes one of Sir Lord Jimmy\u2019s \u201cFingers.\u201d In The Bone Temple\u2019s superbly staged opening sequence, he\u2019s forced to battle an older, stronger gang member\u2014and dispatches him with a lucky strike on a major artery. The slapstick trauma of Spike\u2019s victory, which leaves him shell-shocked and soaked in arterial spray, is particularly startling given the way 28 Years Later worked to generate respect for death, and it\u2019s this dialectic between callowness and care that gives The Bone Temple its shape. While the Fingers continue roaming the countryside in search of candidates for \u201ccharity\u201d\u2014Sir Lord Jimmy\u2019s euphemism for skin-flaying torture\u2014Dr. Kelson is shown continuing his own lonely mission, with a significant twist: Instead of just dodging the members of the infected patrolling the woods beyond the Bone Temple, he\u2019s resolved to study them\u2014specifically, whether it\u2019d be possible to concoct a pharmacological cocktail potent enough to offset or even reverse the rage virus\u2019s effects.<\/p>\n

That his most likely test subject is \u201cSamson\u201d\u2014the towering, aforementioned spine-ripping alpha portrayed by former MMA fighter Chi Lewis-Parry\u2014is an example of Garland\u2019s hell-bent goofiness; that The Bone Temple locates real emotion in the tentative, drug-addled interactions between a mute, mountainous zombie and Fiennes\u2019s scrawny, orange-tinted Good Samaritan testifies to his savvy instincts as a dramatist. Is it a bit too tidy when Dr. Kelson\u2014having paralyzed Samson mid-rampage with a blow dart\u2019s worth of morphine and plucked arrows out of his mottled skin\u2014invokes the myth of Androcles and the lion? Of course it is, but broad strokes can be vivid. Aesop\u2019s Fables, the Old Testament, the Book of Revelation, Duran Duran\u2019s greatest hits: The fundamental things still apply as time goes by. Like nobody less than John Boorman circa Zardoz, Garland threads the needle intrepidly between religious, secular, and pop iconography. He also macram\u00e9s in a few gossamer threads of absurdism; for all the prerelease speculation about how The Bone Temple would build on the first installment, nobody could have predicted how closely it would resemble a dudes-rock stoner comedy or, conversely, how that trippiness might metastasize into a kind of cosmic melancholy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The sight gag of a zombie tripping balls works because it\u2019s an apparent non sequitur and because Parry, buried in bulbous scar tissue and kitted out with the most notable prosthetic genitalia since Dirk Diggler, is a magnetic actor even in the (near) total absence of dialogue. It\u2019s an unlikely performance, but it works. As for his scene partner, well: In solidarity with the kamikaze spirit of The Bone Temple (and the whole 28 Years Later experience), I\u2019ll go out on a limb and say that Fiennes\u2019s work here occupies the top slot of his entire filmography.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The paradox of Fiennes\u2019s acting has always resided in his judicious, stage-trained technique. He\u2019s so precise and controlled that he can be a cipher, whether the role calls for it or not. As Dr. Kelson, his natural guardedness is contextualized by the postapocalyptic setting and offset by the character\u2019s desire to open up\u2014to Spike and his mom in 28 Years Later and to Samson here. Loneliness is transubstantiated into compassion. In one of the film\u2019s best scenes, Dr. Kelson cautiously exchanges pleasantries with Sir Lord Jimmy, compelling the latter to call him the only person he\u2019s ever really liked. The pathos of that statement bleeds through the showy, strategically appalling flamboyance of O\u2019Connell\u2019s acting, which DaCosta controls even more effectively than Ryan Coogler did in Sinners<\/p>\n

There\u2019s not much more that can be said about The Bone Temple\u2019s contents without stepping on Garland\u2019s most carefully prepared revelations; suffice it to say that the raft of articles about Boyle\u2019s plans for the next installment in the series have spoiled one major detail but also that the plot point in question plays as something more substantial than fan service. (As for the other big surprise, it\u2019s a matter of staging rather than story, and the audience in Toronto gave it an actual ovation.) There\u2019s sure to be some debate about whether releasing The Bone Temple in the doldrums of Dumpuary is a misstep or a masterstroke; I\u2019d say that it benefits from being seen in such close proximity to its predecessor and that the accrued goodwill between them is enough that this new trilogy should be considered a classic if Boyle sticks the landing.<\/p>\n

With that in mind, it might seem silly to invoke The Lord of the Rings as a point of comparison, but Garland and Boyle\u2014and now DaCosta\u2014are working in a similarly mythic, epic register. There\u2019s only one tower in The Bone Temple, but its relative smallness belies how ably it conveys a larger reality beyond the frame. More than any recent end-of-the-world allegory, the verdant, overgrown wasteland of the 28 Years Later films feels uncannily\u2014and tenderly\u2014like home: contested territory that\u2019s at once dangerous to navigate and hopefully still worth saving. To paraphrase Dr. Kelson\u2019s beloved Simon Le Bon, it\u2019s an ordinary world; watching its inhabitants learn to survive is as thrilling as movies get these days.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Adam Nayman<\/p>\n

<\/a>Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book \u2018The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together\u2019 is available now from Abrams.
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