Savile Wigs, Droogs, and the Bone Temple: 28 Years Later Is British Horror at Its Best
A review of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple as British cultural archaeology — where pop detritus, damaged faith, and post-pandemic memory shape a world built from what we failed to bury.
Nia DaCosta’s The Bone Temple isn’t really about zombies. It’s about what survives when civilisation collapses: Savile, Burgess, children’s television, junkyard religion, and the strange, analogue beauty of a Britain patched together from memory and menace.
I can’t remember the last time I saw a genuine double bill at the cinema. Probably not since Tarantino’s Grindhouse experiment back in 2007. Here, though, the pairing felt earned rather than gimmicky. Most of the audience had already seen last year’s 28 Years Later, Danny Boyle’s return to the virus-ravaged Britain he helped define. What followed was not an add-on or a footnote, but something stranger and better.
Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026) is the first truly brilliant film of the year. Its great trick is that it slips seamlessly alongside Boyle’s film while refusing to imitate it. Instead, DaCosta brings a different energy altogether — chaotic, analogue, gloriously British in spirit if not in passport. It feels like a 1970s horror film filtered through post-pandemic memory: dark, mad, camp, and unexpectedly tender.
Ralph Fiennes is magnificent. He plays Dr Ian Kelson, a remnant of science and civilisation haunting the apocalypse three decades after the virus. Kelson is not a madman in the usual sense, but a bedraggled soul clinging to enlightenment long after its social usefulness has collapsed. His domain, the Bone Temple itself, is one of the most striking spaces the franchise has produced: a memento mori built from dead language and dead bodies, part cathedral, part museum, part joke played too straight. It is grotesque and symbolic and just camp enough to work.
The film picks up the odyssey of Spike (Alfie Williams), which began at the end of the previous film’s forest sequence and ended on a literal cliff edge. From there we meet “The Jimmys” — a roaming gang whose horror comes not from infection but recognition. Jimmy Savile wigs, tracksuits, gold chains. Their leader, Sir Lord Jimmy (Jack O’Connell), wears the charm of the vicious and the cruel with alarming ease. These are not monsters from elsewhere; they are the ghosts of British television, celebrity, and organised cruelty stitched together into a new theology.
Moving through the margins are gangs that feel less like zombies and more like Anthony Burgess’ Manchester droogs — not futurist caricatures, but recognisably local forms of menace. Youth as performance. Violence as style. The echo of A Clockwork Orange lingers not as homage, but as cultural residue, something half-remembered and badly repurposed.
DaCosta fills the film with extraordinary images: the ruined countryside, beautiful and empty; the Bone Temple’s circular altar of skulls; the contrast between pastoral calm and cultural rot. Fiennes’ Kelson is at the centre of this — Latin-speaking, morphine-dependent, half priest, half scientist. His relationship with Samson the Alpha (Chi Lewis Parry), the new leader of this blasted earth, is one of the film’s strangest pleasures. When Duran Duran plays and the two men dance together in the circle of bones, the effect is absurd, moving, and oddly hopeful. Love, here, is damaged but still possible.
Fiennes delivers a sequence already destined for cult status: Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast blaring as he performs a mock-satanic sermon, attempting to convince others — and perhaps himself — of his infernal credentials. In the freezing northern cinema where I watched it, the audience laughed, gasped, and leaned forward. It was bonkers. And crucially, it felt physical. Not CGI-slick, not frictionless. More Hammer House than Hollywood. The horror is always only one step away.
What The Bone Temple understands is that apocalypse isn’t just about zombies. It’s about what cultural debris survives. Children’s television returns as trauma. Religion mutates into something theatrical and cruel. O’Connell’s Jimmy Crystal builds a new belief system from Savile, Satanism, and spectacle — a made-up faith that feels terrifyingly plausible. As these anti-heroes unwind, the film exposes the everyday turned bad, the familiar rendered monstrous.
And here’s the twist: Kelson, the bone-dwelling eccentric who initially appears the worst of them, may be the last vestige of goodness. Of care. Of humanity. This is a post-apocalypse we recognise not after the film ends, but before it begins.
The film is joyous, wild, and sharply acted throughout. It imagines a Britain of noble savages and junkyard mystics, where the soul of civilisation is pitted against the theocratic madness of CBeebies-inspired youths in tracksuits and human-skin masks. Though DaCosta is American, the film feels steeped in British horror tradition — dark humour, moral ambiguity, pop detritus everywhere. It’s a world Burgess might have recognised: not dystopia as prophecy, but something already half-lived in post-industrial cities, patched together from music, menace, and bravado.
The Bone Temple is shot beautifully. It’s a work of art assembled from madness, memory, and upcycled culture. A fragile society of maniacs, dancing among bones. You will recognise it immediately. And you’ll probably love it for that.