After the absolutely berserk ending of last summer’s 28 Years Later, the melancholic apocalypse suddenly invaded by a gang of backflipping Jimmy Savile lookalikes, it did seem a little harsh that Danny Boyle was asking a new director to take the reins of handling the immediate aftermath of one of franchise cinema’s wildest tonal shifts. Thankfully, with The Bone Temple, series newbie Nia DaCosta and returning writer Alex Garland have proven more than up to the task, 2026’s first big worldwide cinematic release a thrilling and fascinating kickoff to a new year in movies.
Picking up almost immediately where Boyle’s film left off, we’re reintroduced to Spike (Alfie Williams) as he is forcefully inducted into the cultish Jimmy gang, led by self-proclaimed son of the devil Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) in a messy, bloody fight to the death against the member he’ll be replacing. ‘Humans are the real monsters’ is hardly a revolutionary take on zombie fiction, but just how monstrous the Jimmies are is genuinely shocking, Spike getting ever more desperate to leave after every stomach-turning assault and murder, described by Crystal as ‘charity’. Though, like its predecessor, The Bone Temple is less interested in gory scares than Days and Weeks were, when DaCosta cuts loose, it is *gnarly*.
Not very far away geographically, but the other side of the planet spiritually, sits our other returning hero, Doctor Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) and his quest to understand, even cure, the infected, especially hulking Alpha Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), who has started to willingly let Kelson dose him with morphine, enjoying the peace. While, despite an excellent performance from O’Connell, the Jimmies side of things can sometimes feel just a little underbaked, with Spike sidelined a lot of the time, the Kelson-Samson stuff is just fantastic.
Watching Samson evolve is endlessly intriguing, with Lewis-Parry able to bring so many new layers to what could have been just a roaring monster, while Fiennes is, yet again, superb – a later scene in which he goes nuts headbanging to Iron Maiden’s ‘The Number of the Beast’ just absolutely rules. The question Garland is posing is clear – in hard times, do we choose cruelty or radical empathy? – and the way he and DaCosta answer it is affectingly direct, the power of Kelson’s kindness far more impactful than all the smirking brutality of the Jimmies, no matter how many families they skin.
Inevitably, The Bone Temple is substantially less stylistically bold than its predecessor, and Boyle’s manic state-of-the-nation addresses are missed – this is a much more conventional film, all told (even the Jimmies, though still a freakish and nicely unexplained presence, have stopped backflipping). It’s no less exciting, though; action set-pieces remain pulse-pounding, and the plotting is maybe even more compelling than last time out, deepening this strange new world without getting into the weeds of ‘lore’. A little bit of sequel bait at the end aside (the mooted third instalment of Years is not quite yet a sure thing), The Bone Temple also forms a wonderfully complete duology with Boyle’s film, two films looking at how far Britain has fallen, with just enough hope that we can one day pull ourselves back up.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 