28 Years Later The Bone Temple review: Ralph Fiennes is magnetic in appetite killing horror sequel

At one point in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, someone refers to Ralph Fiennes’ character as “the dark lord”.

We won’t explain the context for this as it’s semi-spoilery, but as any Harry Potter fan knows, “the dark lord” is one of the names used for Lord Voldemort, the villainous wizard Fiennes played in the films. That Big Bad had a slivery physicality, with Fiennes gliding through the spaces he dominated.

Fiennes has long been one of the great actors of his generation, as a tragic romantic lead in The English Patient, a spidery mobster in In Bruges, a charming concierge in Grand Budapest Hotel or a Cardinal wrestling with his own ambitions in Conclave. Fiennes has range.

But he’s never been quite as magnetic as he is in the deeply stressful 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. Considering he’d already played the same role in the predecessor movie released last year, it’s remarkable that in this follow-up, there’s still another level in his performance that reveals itself.

As the enigmatic Dr Ian Kelson, a former GP who has spent almost three decades on his own, erecting enormous temple structure made out of the bones of victims, Fiennes has the delicate task of representing humanity and hope in a dystopian world.

And he has to do it while looking the way Kelson does – bald head, bulging eyes, tattered clothes, skin erratically stained red from the iodine he rubs all over himself to stave off the zombie virus. At one point, someone from afar mistakes him for the physical manifestation of Satan.

Fiennes, in the hands of director Nia DaCosta, who takes over this instalment from Danny Boyle, imbues gentleness and decency in a character we’ve seen clean corpses down to their bones.

The Bone Temple is the second chapter in, hopefully, a trilogy of sequels to the zombie outbreak horror 28 Days Later. A direct follow-up to 28 Years Later, it picks up on two plots that will eventually intersect again.

The first is that of Kelson’s story. We met him in the earlier film, and here, he is still tending to his memorial bone temple by day while by night, he retreats to his underground bunker where he indulges in the remnants of a former life.

On the walls of his candle-lit den are photographs of the before times, of him and a woman. There are also records as Duran Duran’s Girls on Film and Ordinary World connect Kelson to our era. The needle drops in this film are fantastic, and Fiennes dancing to Iron Maiden is, uh, something else. You really have to see it.

Kelson befriends, in a way, an alpha zombie he’s named Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) when he discovers the morphine cocktail of his blowgun darts doesn’t just subdue the beast but offers the potential for lucidity.

In the world of 28 Days/Weeks/Years Later, the zombie infection is called the “Rage Virus”, which has a specific resonance in 2026 as anger, division and an inability to widen narrow perspectives rule the public and political discourse. We see it in Australia, and we see it all over the world.

In a way, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, through Kelson, offers a radical optimism that we don’t have to accept it. We don’t have to give in to our basest instincts.

That’s the other side of the film, the plotline centred on Spike (Alfie Williams), the young teen from the previous film who at the end of that, runs into Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), the self-declared cult leader who has modelled himself and his followers, some of them reluctant, on the stylings of Jimmy Saville.

Spike is forced into the group after he accidentally kills one of the gang, and is appalled at the group’s sadistic violence. What they do to a group of survivors in a farmstead is genuinely grotesque. You’d have to have an iron stomach and rock-hard de-sensitisation to not look away from these scenes.

If Jimmy is the epitome of chaotic violence and self-interest in a dystopian world, and Kelson represents the opposite, then the film’s contention is that the conflict is not between humanity and zombies, but people versus people.

Zombies are victims, but Jimmy (yes, with unresolved traumas from the day the zombie pillage came for his family) chooses to be who he is.

In the most challenging and horrific circumstances, the core of who we choose to be is still up to us, fight

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a great film, Kelson is a great character and Fiennes’ performance is one for the ages.

A quarter of a century into a franchise, it’s extraordinary that a new chapter still has the ability to surprise us.

Rating: 4/5

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is in cinemas