An atheist and a satanist walk into a bone temple…
28 Years Later, released last year, had its fair share of religious allusions, but it turns out they were mostly paving the way for the existential questions that drive that movie’s follow-up: 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. A gory, violent consideration of end-times theology, the absence of God, and demonology, Bone Temple moves the franchise from the zombie genre into something closer to religious horror.
The Bone Temple reunites us with Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), the hermit physician who presides over the title location: an ossuary he’s constructed from the countless bodies left in the wake of a savage rage virus. We also learn much more about a figure we met in the final moments of 28 Years Later: Jack O’Connell’s Sir Jimmy Crystal, the leader of a gang of roving sadists (think 2001’s droogs) who believes God has abandoned the world and that he, Sir Jimmy, is the son of the devil. “I’m an atheist, you’re a satanist,” Kelson tells Sir Jimmy when they meet late in the film, eliciting one of Jimmy’s twinkling, rotten-toothed smiles.
From the beginning of this series (2002’s 28 Days Later, which was followed by 2007’s 28 Weeks Later), these movies have asked a central question: when it all falls apart—when terror and violence are the order of the day—who will you be? The Bone Temple suggests that the worldview someone brings into the calamity will largely determine their response. For Kelson, who believes in reason and science as the foundation of all things, it’s important to at once treasure this life and be realistic about the inevitability of death—“memento mori,” as he tells young Spike (Alfie Williams) in 28 Years Later. (Spike reluctantly falls in with Sir Jimmy’s lot in this new film.) Sir Jimmy—who we know from the prologue of 28 Years Later was raised by a vicar who perversely welcomed the rage virus as God’s final judgement—has come to filter the catastrophe through his religious trauma. If all has gone to hell, why not envision yourself as the prince of the place?
It’s notable that there is no representation of a faithful, orthodox Christian community in The Bone Temple and what that worldview might engender in this catastrophic environment. Not that screenwriter Alex Garland—who also wrote 28 Years and 28 Days—has expressed much interest in such a perspective. His movies as a writer and director include Ex Machina, Annihilation, and Men, all of which weave biblical references and imagery into inventive narratives laced with a pessimistic, sci-fi humanism. Nothing Garland has done before, however, has so wildly borrowed from the Bible as the climax of The Bone Temple. I dare not spoil all the details, except to say that the sequence gives Fiennes and O’Connell—both excellent throughout—a chance to explore the wilder fringes of their characters in a theatrical set piece that blends Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast” with Christ’s final words on the cross.
The sequence is also a showcase for new director Nia Da Costa. (Danny Boyle directed 28 Years Later and 28 Days Later, while Juan Carlos Fresnadillo directed what remains my favorite of the bunch: 28 Weeks Later.) Da Costa and cinematographer Sean Bobbitt mostly stay true to the frantic, antic style of Boyle and Anthony Dod Mantle in the previous film, without foregrounding those qualities quite as much as 28 Years Later did. In this climax, however, something both more outrageous and disciplined takes place, with psychedelic camera movements and effects anchored in stunning, widescreen compositions. (Filmed at night, the candlelit bone temple looks like a forest that’s been ossified by flames.)
Amidst all this fervent darkness, near the film’s very end, there is also a striking visual grace note: an overhead shot of a dying character’s face, in which the camera pulls back and slowly rises heavenward. Suggestive of a departing soul, it may be the only hint of the metaphysical in what is, ironically, a deeply religiously minded movie.
(2/4/2026)
