’28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’ Review: A Haunting, Unexpectedly Poetic Zombie Film

Zombie films are rarely poetic. Their modus operandi is usually so brutal, their mechanics so relentless, that there’s little room for anything resembling beauty or melancholy. When those elements do appear, they tend to surface only in fleeting moments. After all, survival comes first, and there’s rarely time to stop and reflect on existence. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple still has its share of running, hiding, and fending off attackers—but it also suggests other ways of confronting them. Or rather, it proposes a different way of understanding that the “infected” may not be the primary threat, nor the worst thing happening to those who remain.

For much of its runtime, Nia DaCosta’s film unfolds across two parallel narratives that eventually converge. Each operates with its own rhythm and emotional drive. One leans into the familiar tensions of dystopian, post-apocalyptic storytelling, though its focus is less on clashes between the living and the undead than on humans at varying stages of psychological collapse. The other strand, while still involving these creatures—especially one in particular—moves in a radically different direction, becoming a calm, almost meditative study of the possibility of connection between man and beast.

The ending of 28 Years Later, the third entry in the saga conceived by Alex Garland, wasn’t especially promising. A group of costumed survivors took in the young Spike (Alfie Williams), hinting at a turn toward more straightforward action. That impulse lingers here, but DaCosta shifts the focus away from Spike’s survival in a hostile world and toward the moral challenges of belonging to a group that behaves in ways as predatory as the zombies themselves—if not worse, since they act with full awareness.

Led by the ominously named Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), whose backstory as a survivor shaped by religious extremism was introduced in the previous film, this pseudo-satanic faction recalls the gang from A Clockwork Orange. Operating like a cult, they stage what they call “charities”—ritualized acts of violence in which victims are torn apart, often forced to compete against the group’s members, known as “Fingers,” who dispatch them with calculated cruelty.

Spike survives one such ordeal by killing one of these “Jimmies” (they all go by the same name). He’s accepted into the group, but witnessing—and participating in—its brutal treatment of captured outsiders leaves him deeply conflicted. He has no real choice but to stay, yet it becomes clear he cannot fully embrace their sadistic logic. Among them, only Jimmy Ink (Erin Kellyman) seems to grasp his unease. She, too, recognizes the excesses of Jimmy Crystal and his followers, even as she remains one of their most violent enforcers.

Still, the film’s real achievement lies in its other half, which follows Dr. Ian Kelson, a physician who has managed to survive alone for years amid the infected. Played by Ralph Fiennes in full Apocalypse Now mode—iodine-stained, blasting Duran Duran records, singing along at the top of his lungs, and relying on opiates to endure isolation—Kelson initially appears unhinged. In reality, he is far more lucid than he seems. Where Jimmy Crystal embodies the abuses carried out in the name of faith, Kelson represents science and, above all, empathy.

For much of the film, his main challenge is dealing with Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), an ultra-evolved Alpha zombie—massive, almost mythic in scale, capable of tearing off heads and devouring what’s inside. Kelson’s method for subduing him is as risky as it is simple: he doses him with a morphine-based compound, leaving him dazed, almost contemplative, gazing at the sky and the natural world. The effect is so calming that Kelson joins him, and the two develop a strange, fragile bond. What begins as a survival tactic evolves into something like an experiment: if curing the infected is impossible, could their behavior at least be altered? Could empathy, somehow, reawaken traces of their humanity?

Inevitably, this lyrical scientist and that agent of chaos collide in a film that gradually sidelines its zombies to focus on what truly matters: how human beings respond to the collapse of civilization. The Kelson-Samson storyline echoes Frankenstein, particularly in its suggestion that empathy can humanize a creature previously defined by violence—a violence shaped, in part, by how others have treated it.

DaCosta’s direction oscillates between these two tonal registers—one poetic, the other brutally grounded. In doing so, she moves away from the frenetic camerawork and jagged editing that defined Danny Boyle’s earlier entries in the series, opting instead for a more classical, at times unexpectedly serene visual approach. It’s a choice that ultimately benefits the film.

When these two worlds finally intersect, the result is as unusual as it is memorable, featuring what may well be the best use of an Iron Maiden track in cinema. In that moment, Fiennes unleashes a heavy-metal-inflected echo of his old Voldemort persona in a scene destined to linger. In lesser hands—or in a film with a different sensibility—it might have played as absurd, even unintentionally comic. Here, DaCosta turns it into a rich, charged encounter between opposing worldviews, two radically different ways of confronting threat and survival. At that point, empathy may no longer have a place—but the clash is unforgettable.