28 Years Later The BoneTemple

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple feels less like “a movie that ends” and more like “a movie that strategically parks itself in your brain with the hazards on,” daring you to buy a ticket for the next instalment. Which, to be fair, is kind of the franchise’s love language at this point. Directed by Nia DaCosta and written by Alex Garland, it’s the follow-on to 2025’s 28 Years Later and it plays very much like Chapter Two in a planned bigger story rather than a neat standalone.

If you haven’t seen the previous films, you can still watch it, but you’ll be doing that thing where you nod thoughtfully while secretly feeling like everyone else received a memo. This one assumes you know the world, the rules, the emotional scars, and the general vibe of “civilisation, but make it feral.” It’s not interested in reintroducing itself. It’s interested in escalating visually, tonally, and in the sheer quantity of bodily fluids on screen.

DaCosta makes dystopia look lived-in: not the shiny apocalypse of prestige TV, but the grimy, morally exhausted kind where hope is rationed and trust is basically a black-market commodity. The filmmaking is confident and muscular, with a sense of spatial dread that keeps you braced even in quieter scenes.

This is a film that weaponises contrast—tenderness against brutality, quiet human connection against the loud stupidity of violence. The gore is not coy. It’s frequently enthusiastic. But it’s also not just there for edgelord points; it’s part of the film’s thesis that survival isn’t heroic, it’s messy and often horrifying. Still, what stops it becoming a two-hour endurance test is how deliberately it places moments of gentleness amid the carnage—like small candles in a stadium full of petrol fumes.

And then there’s “Ian”—Dr. Ian Kelson—played by Ralph Fiennes, who turns up and immediately reminds everyone what acting looks like. He’s magnetic in a deeply human way: not “cool,” not “badass,” just painfully alive inside a world that’s doing its best to sandpaper the soul off everyone. The performance brings a kind of bruised compassion that grounds the film’s bleakest stretches, and honestly, if the series has a conscience at this point, it’s wearing Fiennes’ face.

Tonally, The Bone Temple walks a tightrope: it wants to be savage and sincere, poetic and punishing. Sometimes that clash is exactly what gives it bite because the horror hits harder when you’ve just been allowed to feel something. Other times, it can feel like the film is arguing with itself about what it wants to be: meditative elegy or full-throttle nightmare carnival. But even when it swerves, it does so with intent, not laziness.

The big caveat is: it’s a connector. A bridge. A meticulously crafted slab of story-architecture that’s built to hold up whatever comes next. Whether that thrills you or annoys you will depend on your tolerance for modern franchise filmmaking where endings are apparently considered “a bit rude.”

Still: as a well-made, vicious, intermittently tender dystopian zombie film, it absolutely delivers. It’s grisly. It’s bleak. It’s strangely heartfelt. And it proves—again—that this series isn’t really about zombies so much as people: what we worship, what we become, and what we’re willing to do when the world stops pretending it’s civilised.