Before 2025’s 28 Years Later, there had been a nearly two-decade gap between the second and third entry in the British film series about a bloodborne zombie virus and the resulting social collapse. It’s only been six or so months and here comes a fourth entry, titled 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, which was filmed back-to-back with its predecessor and picks up right where that one left off.
The 28 Days/Weeks/Years series, devised by Danny Boyle and Alex Garland, has been visually experimental since the beginning; the movies were shot on consumer-grade DV cameras or iPhones. The Bone Temple is the most conventionally photographed of the four; director Nia DaCosta and her cinematographer Sean Bobbitt have traded in the earlier films’ grainy, claustrophobic style for wide-open shots of the British countryside — lush settings haunted by violence.
The Bone Temple also has the fewest hordes of snarling, fast-moving zombies; the epidemic is here represented by a single hulking, naked monster known as the Alpha (played by nearly seven-foot-tall stuntman and actor Chi Lewis-Perry). It (or is it he?) was a rabid, unstoppable threat in the last movie, but that was before he crossed paths with Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), the Colonel Kurtz-like mad scientist who lives alone amongst totemic towers made of human bones.
Kelson has been experimenting with medicinal formulas and drug cocktails, pilfered from nearby abandoned houses, and one of his concoctions transforms the Alpha into a docile, nearly comatose lamb. Their relationship is the stuff of Frankenstein, and their scenes have a bizarre, weirdly touching energy that I found lacking in Guillermo Del Toro’s recent interpretation of the classic story.
As with most monster movies, it’s the humans that pose the truest threat. Here, it’s the grinning gang leader Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), whose followers are blond-wigged hooligans obsessed with British children’s television. Young Spike (Alfie Williams), our hero in the last 28 Years Later, has been pulled into Jimmy’s ranks, and he looks on in horror as they kill, kidnap and torture their way through this quaint British village. We know they’ll eventually cross paths with the crazed doctor, an unstoppable force crashing into an immovable object.
DaCosta, whose work has run the gamut from low-budget drama to Marvel blockbuster, isn’t afraid to inflict tonal whiplash. The first hour of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple contains perhaps the nastiest, most brutish, most unsettling violence of the series — fingers digging into brain matter, cracking bones, peeled and burning flesh. But all that coexists with crazed, broad comedy and pop musical moments.
In fact, the first hour of The Bone Temple is so unexpected and tonally wackadoo that I was a bit dismayed as the movie settled into the most conventional third act of the franchise. But that doesn’t mean it’s not satisfying — and besides, this franchise’s idea of convention is pretty strange. Like all its predecessors, The Bone Temple leaves us on a cliffhanger. But unlike the previous film, this one doesn’t feel incomplete.
Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM and Saturday afternoons at 2 PM on SPR News.