28 Years Later: The Bone Temple avoids the common pitfalls of many sequels. It doesn’t needlessly rehash more of the same from Alex Garland’s 2025 28 Years Later movie, but it also avoids breaking entirely from the characters, themes or feel of the first installment. It does what the best sequels do, taking the most interesting aspects of 28 Years Later and building on them in an imaginative and interesting way. It’s unpredictable and creative. Its pieces come together into a beautifully deranged climax.

The Bone Temple picks up almost exactly where 28 Years ended. A young boy named Spike has abandoned the safe haven of an island village to find his own path on the zombie-infested mainland, and fallen into the hands of Jimmy Crystal and his cult of Jimmies. Jimmy’s presence lurked in the backdrop of the first 28 Years Later film, and the sequel successfully builds him into a terrifying and compelling antagonist. 

Jimmy Crystal is a satanist, invoking the presence and voice of “Ol’ Nick,” or Satan, as witness to his cult violence. In Jimmy’s mind, the zombie apocalypse was not a result of a virus, but of Satan unleashing his demons upon the world. In the face of senseless horror, violence and complete societal collapse, Jimmy embraces sadism, suffering and chaos. He is not a victim of the apocalypse; he is an agent of it. His cult, now including Spike, roams the countryside giving out what they call “charity,” on behalf of their Dark Lord, which includes actions like skinning innocent people alive. 

Jimmy’s followers, or “fingers” (of Satan’s hand) as he calls them, are interchangeable. They wear blond wigs and tracksuits, all styled after real-world British TV personality Jimmy Savile. Savile was posthumously discovered to have been a serial abuser of children, information never revealed to the public due to the outbreak of the zombie virus in the movie’s universe. 

Spike is inducted into the cult after killing one of its members in a ritualistic knife fight. He takes the fallen finger’s blond wig, agrees that his name is now also Jimmy (the members’ names are Jimmy Fox, Jimmy Ink, Jimmy Jimmy, Jimmy Jones, Jimmy Snake, Jimmy Shite, and Jimmima) and becomes a member. 

This ritual of member replacement via life or death combat is standard for Jimmy’s cult. There is no loyalty except to “Sir Lord” Jimmy Crystal, and many of the members were inducted after witnessing the cult slaughter and torture their friends and families. Spike is half member, half hostage, disgusted by the cult’s activities but unable to escape. 

At the same time, Dr. Kelson lives a relatively peaceful and simple life, constructing the titular Bone Temple, or ossuary. A temple of human bones is certainly morbid, but Kelson is a pacifist, incorporating only the already dead. The temple is meant to honor the lives of those who constitute its structure. While Spike is along for a gratuitously violent ride with the Jimmies, Dr. Kelson begins an unlikely friendship with a massive zombie named Samson. He pacifies Samson with drugs, and they hang out high together. A guy getting high with his silent zombie bro is a great example of the creativity and unpredictability of this film. The scenario is both absurd and touching. Kelson’s study of Samson prompts the doctor to raise an interesting question for the zombie genre: “when the infected attack, what do they see?” The movie explores the possibility of  humanity and memory in the undead.

The performances from Jack O’Connell (recently famous as the antagonist of 2025’s Sinners) as Jimmy Crystal and Ralph Fiennes as Dr. Ian Kelson are both fantastic. Jimmy is a menacing, manipulative fanatic, and O’Connell captures his gleeful evil perfectly. Fiennes plays Dr Kelson as a broken, eccentric, yet fundamentally kind man, a doctor who never abandoned his oath even as the world collapsed around him—a man with compassion for the living, the dead and the undead. 

When these characters interact, Kelson’s kindness reveals a vulnerable and childlike side to Jimmy. The film is able to humanize him without playing for sympathy or undermining the extent of his evil. He opens up to Kelson about his life and origins, tells Kelson he’s easy to talk to, and then threatens to gut him alive. 

I love the way Jimmy and Kelson represent different ways to respond to an anarchic and violent world. Jimmy embraces chaos and evil, imagining himself as a warrior in Satan’s demonic onslaught against mankind. Kelson responds to this same chaos and evil with individual resistance, embracing pacifism and doing all he can to extend care and empathy. The intersection of these philosophical opposites results in a hellish musical performance (you’ll have to watch to see how). The only appropriate response to Dr. Kelson, clad in black leather, singing Metallica in a flamelit temple made of human bones, is “hell yeah.” 

The Bone Temple is first and foremost an enjoyable action horror movie. It doesn’t emotionally astound or have anything with too much depth to say on the human condition. That being said, the movie explores themes of weaponized nostalgia and loss of self and identity for both the living and the undead well. It asks unfortunately relevant questions about how one responds to an increasingly violent breakdown of societal order, urging viewers to avoid Jimmy’s embrace of immorality, and instead follow Kelson, and embrace compassion in whatever way we can.