*Contains spoilers for ‘28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’*
This week, Nia DaCosta’s film 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple releases in theaters. It is the most recent installment in a franchise that began 24 years ago, when director Danny Boyle terrified audiences with his post-apocalyptic horror film 28 Days Later. This is a franchise uniquely suited to sequels and spin-offs, as Boyle and writer Alex Garland seem to have tapped into an endless supply of ideas with the world they’ve created. DaCosta’s newest installment proves exactly that, and there has never been a better time to reflect on the legacy of this franchise and why it still has legs for a new trilogy more than two decades later.
The release of 28 Days Later has become a cultural touchstone for a plethora of reasons. For one, it marks the first true collaboration between Boyle and Garland. (Boyle had previously directed The Beach (2000), an adaptation of Garland’s 1996 novel of the same name). Cillian Murphy also gave his breakthrough performance in 28 Days Later – a role that would propel him down the path to becoming the Academy Award-winning movie star he is now.
The film has also become a staple of the post-apocalyptic and zombie horror subgenres. As much as decisions like having the infected run rather than walk slowly, or the speed at which humans turn once they have been infected, influence future zombie movies and TV shows, it’s the rich thematic content and innovative visual stylings of 28 Days Later that have cemented its legacy and allowed it to evolve beyond one single film and into a successful franchise. Recently, we have been seeing an increasing trend in horror films that aim not only to scare audiences but also to explore deeper themes. Boyle and Garland were on the cutting edge of this emerging trend back in 2002, and their 2025 reintroduction of the franchise, 28 Years Later, proved they can adapt to the genre’s evolution since the first film.
28 Days Later follows a man named Jim (Cillian Murphy) who awakens from a coma only to discover that Great Britain has been overrun and largely destroyed by victims of the ‘rage virus,’ an infection that has been unleashed from a secure laboratory.
Boyle is a very visually innovative filmmaker, and he (along with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle and editor Chris Gill) employs unconventional editing and filming techniques that give this film a grainy, choppy appearance. This accentuates the fast-paced action and disorientation, adding to the film’s scare factor. It also makes the film distinctive even among other post-apocalyptic zombie movies.
However, it’s the uninfected humans who often pose the most sinister threat in this film – a major theme that will be present in each subsequent installment. Jim, along with fellow survivors Selena (Naomie Harris) and Hannah (Megan Burns), responds to a military broadcast promising protection, only to find that it’s a trap designed by a group of soldiers to lure surviving women into captivity for the purpose of reproduction. What’s jarring is not just the barbarism of this behavior, but the fact that it has occurred in so short a time. Within 28 days of the initial disaster, surviving humans have already resorted to physical and sexual violence under the guise of preserving humanity, all the while sacrificing their own.
The second installment, 28 Weeks Later, was released five years later and directed by Spanish filmmaker Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. As the title implies, it picks up 28 weeks after the initial outbreak and follows an entirely new group of characters, including military sniper Doyle (Jeremy Renner), US Army medical officer Scarlet (Rose Byrne), and young survivors Tammy (Imogen Poots) and Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton). In this film, the infected have gradually died off due to starvation, and the US military has begun facilitating the return of survivors to the British mainland.
Fresnadillo is a new introduction to the franchise, but the editing and cinematography of 28 Weeks Later emulate the style Boyle employed in the first film. The action is unrelenting, but the film grounds itself in its two young leads, Tammy and Andy, who are returning to Britain to reunite with their father, Don (Robert Carlyle). Unbeknownst to any of them, the kids’ mother, Alice (Catherine McCormack), has also survived due to some unknown genetic immunity to the virus. This leads to the hypothesis that one or both of the children may also be immune, and their survival becomes paramount as containment fails and the infected are once again unleashed on the British Isles.
The military personnel in this film go to controversial and deadly extremes in their effort to contain and eradicate the infection. This is reminiscent of the soldiers in 28 Days Later, who excuse their barbaric actions by claiming they are protecting the future of the human race. But the soldiers and commanding officers in 28 Weeks Later only demonstrate another extreme response to disaster, and one that has now developed into a full-scale military operation.
Additionally, the elapse of 28 weeks since the initial outbreak allows for grief to sink in, and the heavy weight of all the people who have been lost to the infection sits over everything in this movie. While great losses are incurred in 28 Days Later, the shorter timeframe does not allow the characters to slow down and sit with it as they are now able to. Along with that grief come feelings of guilt, as well as the panicked desperation to prevent these events from repeating. Death and grief are popular themes within the wider horror genre, especially in the 21st century, and it’s no surprise that this franchise would be an effective place to examine them. While these themes underscore the main narrative in this film, they will be brought to the forefront in the next.
After 28 Weeks Later, there is a break of almost 20 years until the franchise continues with 28 Years Later. Garland and Boyle returned to write and direct, and it was announced that it would also be the first in a new trilogy. This is often referred to as a “legacy sequel,” which is a follow-up to a popular film or franchise that has been inactive for many years. Legacy sequels of other films have been successful and unsuccessful to varying degrees, but Boyle and Garland make a strong case for this type of storytelling with 28 Years Later.
Boyle once again pushes the boundaries of visual storytelling in 28 Years Later. The film is shot entirely on iPhones, the cuts are quick and disorienting, and the visual language shifts rapidly. However, in the hands of a filmmaker as skilled as Boyle (along with editor Jon Harris and returning cinematographer Dod Mantle), the result is a gripping, tense, and uniquely profound story of loss and the rebuilding of society nearly three decades after a world-altering catastrophe.
The film’s setting provides a plethora of new themes and characters to explore, and it’s no wonder that Garland and Boyle had a whole trilogy’s worth of ideas from the outset. In 28 Years Later, we see a society rebuilt from the ground up. The infection has not been cured or eradicated, but rather contained to the British Isles, which remain under a strict quarantine.
Garland and Boyle use this basic premise to play on the audience’s fear of isolation, an anxiety that is now ingrained in the collective consciousness, having all just lived through the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting quarantines. The pair have always been smart about responding to current events in their movies, with 28 Days Later resonating with growing public fears about the rise in warfare and violence around the world in the early 2000s.
While society has been rebuilt around the infected, survivors are sparse, and the only things that exist on the islands are small towns and villages protected by high walls and watchtowers. The film’s protagonist, Spike (Alfie Williams), is a twelve-year-old boy, representative of a new generation born into this society, never having experienced what it was like to live in a world before the outbreak. Even his parents, Isla (Jodie Comer) and Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), would have been children at the time of the outbreak.
They have all grown up surrounded by the death and violence caused by the rage virus. What 28 Years Later seeks to explore, though, and what Spike learns throughout the film, is that death is one of the few true inevitabilities in the world. While it can be violent or cruel, it is often just the nature of the world – a fact he learns firsthand as his mother, Isla, is revealed to be dying of cancer. Rather than approaching the subject of death as inherently morbid, Garland and Boyle treat it with care and reverence. The film culminates in an emotional climax in which Spike says goodbye to his mother before she dies and subsequently places her remains upon a display of bones carefully maintained and preserved by Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes).
One of the film’s other memorable moments is when Isla helps a pregnant, infected woman give birth. It’s a touching moment of connection between infected and uninfected, and it sets things up very nicely for the next film to explore the humanity of the infected.
The following film, titled 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, is a direct continuation of the previous. It is directed by Nia DaCosta, who is an emerging horror director and another new voice within the franchise. The combination of DaCosta’s direction and Garland’s writing allows the film to highlight new ideas and perspectives while staying true to the overarching themes. Garland himself is key to that, with his writing being the one true constant across all of the films. (He is not credited as a screenwriter on 28 Weeks Later, but he executive-produced the film and performed rewrites on the script.)
Building off of the idea of what remains after the collapse of society, The Bone Temple both expands on the existing answers of death, rage, and violence while also leaning heavily into two fresher ideas: science and religion. In this film, these two concepts are presented as diametrically opposed ideals, represented by two of its central characters: the returning Dr. Kelson and Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell). Crystal’s role is teed up in the final scene of 28 Years Later, in which he and his gang of followers (whom he calls “the Jimmies”), clad in jumpsuits meant to evoke their controversial real-world namesake Jimmy Saville, jump in to rescue Spike and fight off the infected.
Crystal’s Jimmies take one end of the spectrum between science and religion, devoting themselves to worshiping who they call “Old Nick” (a nickname for Satan). They believe Old Nick caused the apocalypse, and that by making offerings to him, they can appease him and be allowed to live. This group provides a vessel for Garland to continue to explore the recurring theme of human-on-human violence, and DaCosta does not shy away from capturing the horrific and graphic acts that they commit in the name of Old Nick. DaCosta’s take on the world and the characters in this film is as unflinchingly bleak and violent as the rest of the franchise, making her well-suited to tackle Garland’s script.
The warmth and levity in this film largely come from Dr. Kelson, who stands in opposition to Jimmy Crystal. As a former doctor, he firmly believes that there is a scientific solution to the rage virus. He spends much of this film bonding with Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), an alpha infected, and attempting to concoct a cure for the virus. If Isla sees a fleeting glimpse of humanity in the infected in the previous film, Kelson views them as essentially no different from any other human. After all, if this series has displayed anything, it’s that humanity has the capacity for just as much violence and rage as the infected do. The scenes between Kelson and Samson are upbeat, often comical, and are sharply contrasted with the gruesome, gritty violence of the scenes involving the Jimmies. DaCosta frequently cuts back and forth between the two to further highlight these contrasts. By doing so, she draws attention to the extreme responses any one individual could have to the crisis that has redefined their lives for the past 28 years. Whereas Kelson turns to science and healing, Crystal turns to religion and violence.
This idea can also be expanded and mapped onto the other installments in the franchise: the soldiers in 28 Days Later became obsessed with preserving the future of the human race through reproduction, the military personnel in 28 Weeks Later aimed to end the outbreak through strict containment procedures and extermination protocols, and the townspeople in 28 Years Later sought to preserve culture through their rituals and traditions. The final scene of The Bone Temple introduces another perspective through the reintroduction of Cillian Murphy’s character, Jim, who has carved out a life that seems to prioritize education (specifically world history). The throughline is that, when faced with a situation as extreme as the rage virus outbreak, humans will seek security in a constant or foundation that will not change, no matter what the world around them looks like.
Much like how 28 Days Later resonated with the public’s awareness of increasing violence on a global scale, and 28 Years Later played on new anxieties that sparked from the COVID-19 pandemic, The Bone Temple addresses the shared fear that the systems and protections of our modern society may not be as sturdy as we once thought them to be. With so much uncertainty surrounding our day-to-day lives, there seems to be a growing fear among the general public that our society is on the verge of some sort of collapse or a turning point that changes things irrevocably. Garland and DaCosta use the post-apocalyptic setting of this film to present a world where this imagined shift has already happened and to portray on screen a hypothetical that people have been turning over in their minds more and more frequently.
So what’s next? It has already been announced that Boyle will return to direct the third and final film in the 28 Years Later trilogy with a screenplay by Garland. Details are currently limited, but based on The Bone Temple‘s conclusion, it seems the film will focus mainly on Jim, Spike, and new ally Kelly (Erin Kellyman). Hopefully, we will learn more about Jim’s life since the events of 28 Days Later, as there are many interesting avenues to tie that thematically into the current trilogy.
There’s no doubt that Boyle and Garland will continue to push boundaries in both the direction and the narrative of the next film. We’ll just have to wait and see which new or returning themes they choose to center on, how they distinguish this film stylistically, and what about it will stick in the minds of modern audiences, as all the previous films have.
Article Courtesy of Claire May Lewis
Feature Image from ’28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’ via Sony Pictures Entertainment