28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

Conceived as the middle film of the trilogy Danny Boyle and Alex Garland launched with 28 Years Later (2025), The Bone Temple hands the camera to Nia DaCosta — the director of Candyman (2021) and The Marvels (2023) — working from a Garland screenplay. Shot back-to-back with the first instalment, it reached UK cinemas in January 2026, sometimes paired with its predecessor as a double bill, and continues the story without a pause for breath.

DaCosta inherits the world's grammar — the quarantined island, the mutating infected, the fragile survivor economies of the mainland — and the cast that populates it, with Alfie Williams's Spike again at the centre and Ralph Fiennes returning as the doctor whose rituals among the dead give the film its title. Jack O'Connell's Sir Jimmy Crystal looms larger here, and Erin Kellyman and Chi Lewis-Parry join the ensemble. Cillian Murphy, the face of the original 28 Days Later, returns to the saga.

Where Boyle's entry was all handheld restlessness, DaCosta brings a more composed, ritualistic eye to the infected wilds, and reviewers responded warmly — the film opened to notably strong notices and an audience reception that ran ahead of the first film's more divided one. As a bridge rather than a beginning or an end, it deepens the mythology Garland is building while keeping the trilogy's larger design tantalisingly out of view.