After being picked up by “The Fingers,” Spike (Alfie Williams) is taken to meet Sir Jimmy (Jack O’Connell), their leader, where he must pick one of the fingers to face off against in a death match for the privilege to join Jimmy’s gang. Elsewhere, Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) continues his research on Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), The Alpha, making breakthroughs about the nature of the rage virus and how it changes a person. As Jimmy’s gang roves closer to Kelson’s Bone Temple, the doctor agrees to Sir Jimmy’s request to pose as “Old Nick,” so that Jimmy can maintain control over his Jimmies who are beginning to question his divine leadership.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, despite being shot back-to-back with 28 Years Later (2025) finds Nia DaCosta taking over the director’s seat from Danny Boyle with Alex Garland returning to the page. The film picks up right at the end of 28 Years Later, and serves as a bridge to the rumored final installment of this legacy, redemption trilogy for Boyle and Garland with Jim (Cillian Murphy) returning.

The Bone Temple is a strange film, both in its own merits and within the context of its trilogy and larger franchise. While sometimes the middle bridge between Part 1 and Part 2 can be the strongest entry – The Godfather: Part II (1974), Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), The Dark Knight (2008), Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi (2017) – The Bone Temple does not quite reach those heights, yet it does still have the laurels of being the most interesting entry into the franchise to date. Much of this comes from the decoupling of the material from Boyle which allowed DaCosta to bring on her own collaborators, notably, cinematographer Sean Bobbitt and editor Jake Roberts, into the fold. Using actual production equipment instead of a guerrilla rig of iPhones designed more for the tech company’s marketing team than actual filmmakers means that this entry actually looks really good on the big screen with its deep and lush earth tones. Further, Roberts is able to assemble the action without the dated slow-mo impact which, again, only lends credibility to what we are seeing on screen and helps breathe some new life into a dusty franchise that struggled to remain unique in the wake of The Walking Dead (2010-2022); a series which surely owes some of its own success to 28 Days Later (2002) bringing the zombie genre back in vouge.

28 Years Later was pretty cleanly split between time on the island and time on the mainland, but both parts revolved around Spike. Williams was a revelation and impressively anchored that film even up against his more seasoned scene partners; Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer, and Ralph Fiennes. He is again one of the high marks of the film, here, but The Bone Temple is not as precisely his story to tell, oftentimes being pushed into a more reactionary role. Instead, it is again a split into two distinct stories working towards their convergence, this time focusing on Sir Jimmy and expanding on Dr. Kelson. One of these characters is far more interesting than the other.

Jimmy is not that character. The main problem with him as the main villain of the story is that his character is an amalgamation of all of Garland’s worst tendencies as a screenwriter. Eccentric and odd with a devil may care attitude and a lust for violence, there is nothing here that is actually frightful besides the simple fact that we know he is fulfilling the antagonist role in the narrative. His “fingers” are deeply entrenched in the Teletubbies’ lore, a symptom of their arrested development as the rage virus erupted when they were quite young. This was established in 28 Years Later and created a tonal mishmash that ended that film on such an odd note, and while it is expanded here, it does little to satisfyingly contextualize it. Garland breaks the action and the menace so that Jimmima (Emma Laird) can sing and dance because he is once again substituting absurdity for horror, character, or substance. Later, Garland again gets a little heavy handed on the keys as he wraps up Jimmy’s storyline, bookending the entire third act with his blunt and obvious allusions, but to return to the rest of the film, this approach to character really stunts O’Connell as he does not have any true motivations beyond goofy nonsense in a world that otherwise demands seriousness to survive. It feels like Garland is trying to shape Jimmy into a Joker-like figure, but he has a fundamental misunderstanding of that iconic anarchist because he at least stands for something whereas Jimmy has no true driving principle other than being a little cooky.

Thankfully, though, the other half of the film follows the much more interesting though only marginally more developed Dr. Kelson. Fiennes brings his classically trained gravitas to the role. The true findings and results of his research into Samson are seemingly being held for the next feature so Fiennes, like Williams, finds his role similarly stunted on the page, but we are at least allowed brief glimpses into his findings as he tames and befriends the once-human monster and comes close to unlocking his memories before his infection. While the individual tastes of the audience will ultimately dictate which part of the film that they find more engaging, there is no denying that a lot more thought and care was taken on the page here which makes sense since Kelson is an extension of the film’s namesake as the architect of the Bone Temple. Fiennes lets loose in the role, and while there is still an element of camp around it, there is a lot more purpose behind the ascetic of the performance than with Sir Jimmy so it feels like a much more profound role.

The Bone Temple is a really strange film to level with because on its own, there are a lot of neat ideas at play, but it can not truly be appreciated in a vacuum as there is so much before and clearly much more ahead of it that it makes for an unsatisfying watch by itself. It is almost entirely bridging material leaving audiences frustrated with what they are watching; a sensation only magnified when, in the penultimate scene of the film we realize that everything both 28 Years Later and The Bone Temple were building no longer matters. Kelson is gone. Sir Jimmy is gone. But Jim has returned, and unfortunately for audiences, so will Boyle and Garland return to lead this series into what will surely be a clunky, overwritten, and self-smitten conclusion. He gets so caught up in his own worked-to-the-bone metaphors that the film lacks any specificity of time or place; these characters are wandering aimlessly across the countryside in the same way that Garland circles the drain aimlessly on the page. It is ironic that bringing in an outside creative voice in DaCosta, even still beholden to Garland’s egotistical pages, breathed new life into this series with her eye for horror, penchant for luscious production design, and an overall fiercely modern approach to tried-and-true genre conventions. While this franchise may be better off dead, there is certainty something new and exciting to watch as DaCosta’s career continues to expand.