Warning: This post contains spoilers for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.
If you thought the blond wig-sporting gang of parkour-proficient, tracksuit-outfitted teens who popped up in the final minutes of 28 Years Later to rescue young Spike (Alfie Williams) from a swarm of infected were going to be the heroes of the sequel to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s horror franchise revival, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple certainly has a surprise in store for you.
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The 2025 first installment in the 28 Days Later legacy sequel trilogy explored the fallout from the Rage Virus contagion nearly three decades after the infection originally ravaged U.K. society, following 12-year-old Spike as he left the safety of the secluded Holy Island community behind to investigate what lay beyond the only home he had ever known. Now in theaters, The Bone Temple, directed by Nia DaCosta (Hedda, Candyman) from a script once again written by Garland, picks up pretty much immediately after the events of its predecessor, with Spike being put to a vicious test by the sadistic leader of the so-called Jimmies, the self-styled Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell). The rules of the game are simple: Spike must fight and kill one of Jimmy’s seven followers—or fingers, as he refers to them—and take their place in his crew, or die. A petrified Spike manages to pull this off, mostly out of sheer luck. But that’s only the tip of the terror iceberg where the Jimmies are concerned.
As the group traverses the British countryside—inching ever closer to an inevitable encounter with Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) and his increasingly domesticated Alpha infected Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry)—they come across an unsuspecting group of survivors who have taken up residence at a nearby farm. What follows is an intensely gruesome testament to one of the zombie zeitgeist’s most tried and true tropes: humans, not the undead or infected, are the real monsters.
This is…
