‘28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’ Is the First Great Movie of 2026

January movie release are usually treated like appetizers. Studios save their prestige swings, or the main course, for later in the year, while audiences brace themselves for a stretch of mediocrity. But in 2026, that narrative has already collapsed. With 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, the year has its first genuinely great film, and it arrives with blood on its hands and ideas on its mind.

Directed by Nia DaCosta, The Bone Temple expands the world of the first 28 Days movie imagined by Danny Boyle and Alex Garland. Set decades after the initial outbreak but immediately after the events of 28 Years Later, the film follows two parallel paths, one around Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who forms a friendship with an “alpha” infected named Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry). Kelson believes Samson may be curable, and their relationship is strange and unexpectedly tender.

The other thread picks up after Spike (Alfie Williams) becomes entangled with Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), a sadistic cult leader whose followers model themselves after Jimmy Savile, the disgraced British TV personality whose posthumous legacy revealed decades of systemic abuse. Jimmy Crystal bills himself as the Son of Satan, whom he refers to as “Old Nick” and regularly forces the group to commit acts of “charity,” which is really just code for murdering innocents they cross.

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Critics have taken notice of how spectacular The Bone Temple is. The film currently holds a 93 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and has already been crowned a New York Times Critic’s Pick. In her review, Alissa Wilkinson praised DaCosta stewardship of the franchise, writing, “DaCosta’s talents as a director are a terrific, confident match for this material… There’s no need anymore to self-consciously mimic the chewed up look of the original film’s mini-DV footage.”

Washington Post critic Sonia Rao noted that the film succeeds precisely because it resists mimicry.

“Rather than try to replicate previous efforts in the popular series — generally a losing game — she turns in a film that is funnier and more stylish than the others, and just as poignant," Rao wrote.

Rao added, “The filmmaker… maintains a distinct style even in established series. This elevates The Bone Temple, which holds its own among its popular peers.”

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NME’s Lou Thomas echoed that sentiment, calling the film “bonkers” and “bracing,” while emphasizing the thrill of its unpredictability.

“With a uniformly impressive cast, spectacular scenes of carnage and the unshakeable feeling that anything could happen, this zombie franchise is as thrilling as it’s ever been,” he wrote.

At Vulture, Bilge Ebiri leaned into the film’s joyful excess, describing DaCosta’s balancing act between spectacle and theme.

“The beauty of DaCosta’s film is that these particular ideas are worked in subtly, even though The Bone Temple itself is not what one might call subtle," he wrote. "In fact, it’s downright looney tunes, from Kelson’s occasional dance parties (powered by his collection of early-’80s LPs) to the screwy antics of the Jimmys to one spectacular extended climactic sequence of heavy-metal bravado that had my theater cheering and hollering. But even such scenes of crazed flamboyance fit into the film’s overall sense of a civilization stuck in time, of people mentally frozen at the moment of collapse. The only way to transcend and survive a dying world, it suggests, is to cut loose and find ways to be yourself.”

Still, there has been some pushback. Some critics have noted that The Bone Temple can’t fully stand on its own without the context of the franchise. But that critique feels misplaced. If anything, this installment is the one most likely to endure beyond its lineage. It’s the chapter that lingers, the one that rewards repeat viewings not just for its carnage, but for its ideas.

Nowhere is that clearer than in the extended face-off between O’Connell’s Jimmy and Fiennes’ Kelson. The scenes crackle with menace, intellect, and humor that shouldn’t land the way it does in the desolate world they occupy.

And if this is only the second chapter in this arc of the series? We’re counting the days until the third.

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