In “The Bone Temple,” the full extent of Jimmy’s evil is revealed early on. So, too, is the range of O’Connell’s screen villainy, no less impressively showcased by his recent turn as a vampire in “Sinners.” Jimmy is a gleefully sadistic killer of the living and the undead alike, and a sworn son of Satan, as evidenced by the upside-down cross around his neck. His full name, he insists, is Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, which distinguishes him from the many other Jimmys who make up his band of murderous young disciples, known as the Fingers. (They go by Jimmy Fox, Jimmy Ink, Jimmy Jimmy, Jimmy Jones, Jimmy Snake, Jimmy Shite, and Jimmima.)
Spike is forced to become a Jimmy himself, by fighting one of the other Jimmys to the death and taking his place in the gang. It’s an ugly, ruthless, and nastily allusive scene. The Fingers are clearly modelled on the giggling, rampaging hooligans of “A Clockwork Orange” (1971), and their evil deeds feel at once consciously premeditated and merrily anarchic. They’re much worse, and more frightening, than anything the infected could unleash. All of which is to say that “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” is rather less of a zombie movie than expected. Attacks by the infected are few and far between, and most of the violence on display is meted out by the Jimmys. It brought my squeamishness back in full force. Most repellent of all is a slow-burn sequence in which the Jimmys, having stumbled on a small community of survivors, proceed to string them up in a barn and gradually, meticulously flay them alive. What makes your own skin crawl isn’t just the hideousness of the violence but the unblinking matter-of-factness with which DaCosta films it. She serves it straight up, without gusto—and does not leave you hungry for more.
DaCosta’s distinct visual touch is apparent from the opening scenes. Notably, she has reteamed with the British cinematographer Sean Bobbitt, who filmed her two previous features, the dynamic Ibsen adaptation “Hedda” (2025) and the middling superhero blockbuster “The Marvels” (2023). Gone are the smeary digital palette and whip-panning kineticism of “28 Years Later,” which was recognizably the product of Boyle’s long collaborations with the cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle and the editor Jon Harris. The frenzied, nerve-rattling energy of their techniques made sense; after so many years, they yanked us back into post-apocalyptic Britain with a bracingly nasty jolt. DaCosta, instead, incarnates a watchful stillness; hers is a statelier, more ominously composed doomsday vision. It’s as if, with the dystopian parameters duly established, she wanted us to tarry alongside the characters for a while and make ourselves properly uncomfortable.
Garland’s script is a study in extremes, toggling determinedly between visceral, stomach-churning horror and a more meditative, mind-altering register—the latter supplied almost entirely by Ralph Fiennes’s magnificently witty and poignant performance as Dr. Ian Kelson. When Ian was first introduced, in “28 Years Later,” his filthy, singlet-clad body caked in orange iodine (a natural rage-virus repellent), he popped up at the story’s close like a friendlier Colonel Kurtz, from “Apocalypse Now” (1979)—a scholarly, wild-eyed eccentric, who has tiptoed right up to the edge of crackpotdom but, miraculously, not fallen over it. This time, he’s a lead player from start to finish, and Fiennes teases out the fullness of the character—the pathos of his isolation, the brilliance of his intellect, and the fundamental generosity of his spirit—as only a great actor could. Ian is a record keeper, a meticulous preserver of the past. But he is also a guardian of a future that, despite all the death and suffering he’s seen, he is too much of an optimist to give up on.
To that end, Ian spends most of the new film getting blissfully high with a hulking zombie nudist (Chi Lewis-Parry), whom the good doctor has tamed into drugged-out submission and named Samson. Their stoner rapport—“The Bone Temple” is, at least partly, a zombie-hangout movie—enables Ian to study the rage virus up close and see if its effects might be treated or even reversed. Before too long, Samson begins to achieve a measure of sentience, which makes him an outlier character in a very Romero vein: an evolved zombie, who regains humanizing vestiges of his pre-undead memory and even rediscovers certain rudimentary powers of communication. The character brilliantly crystallizes Garland and DaCosta’s most rigorously developed theme: the crippling loss of identity and individual purpose that the zombie pandemic has engendered among the masses, living and undead alike.