Quickly following up on last summer’s hit sequel 28 Years Later, the latest film in the 28 Days Later franchise arrives in theaters this Friday, and the first reviews are now online. Titled 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, this fourth installment is again written by Alex Garland, but Candyman director Nia DaCosta is now at the helm for a direct continuation of the events seen at the end of the previous movie. Her work is being praised, as is the performance by returning actor Ralph Fiennes. Fans of the franchise will not be disappointed.
Here’s what critics are saying about 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple:
28 Days Later: The Bone Temple is certainly the nastiest and possibly the best of the series.
— Damon Wise, Deadline Hollywood Daily
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple doesn’t just continue one of horror’s most influential franchises; it deepens it, darkens it, and confidently claims its place as one of the most important chapters of the saga.
— Linda Marric, HeyUGuys
If audiences can accept a sequel that has veered into something closer to folk horror than its zombie-adjacent roots, they should be able to plug into its peculiar wavelength.
— David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter
The film’s strongest suit is that DaCosta does not play their sadistic antics for laughs.
— Damon Wise, Deadline Hollywood Daily
The film is most effective when it stages a clash between the doctor’s radical but rational school of thought and the barbarism of paganistic religious fanaticism.
— David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter
One sequence at the movie’s climax… inspired a full-out applause break from a theater full of critics.
— Liz Shannon Miller, Consequence
DaCosta’s direction is nothing short of exceptional. She demonstrates a sharp understanding of what makes the 28 films resonate with their fandom.
— Linda Marric, HeyUGuys
DaCosta does a solid job of echoing Boyle’s directing choices even as she smooths out the rough edges and makes some signature moves of her own.
— Liz Shannon Miller, Consequence
DaCosta — perhaps much more than Danny Boyle — understands how much work the horror genre can do for you.
— Damon Wise, Deadline Hollywood Daily
The Hedda director combines her bold narrative instincts with her gift for close-up portraiture to throw her characters into sharp relief.
— David Ehrlich, IndieWire
The visuals are typically dynamic and the English locations panoramic, even if DP Sean Bobbitt’s work doesn’t quite match the hard-driving energy of Boyle’s longtime cinematography collaborator Anthony Dod Mantle.
— David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter
Where the fantastically crass experimentalism of Anthony Dod Mantle’s 28 Years Later cinematography helped convey how raw and uncertain the world felt to Spike when he left the shelter of Holy Island, Sean Bobbitt’s (almost) equally artful but less aggressive lensing allows this movie to register as the unyielding stuff of Spike’s new reality.
— David Ehrlich, IndieWire
The most generous reading of The Bone Temple’s largely anonymous visual style is that it’s called for by what is a more traditionally structured and grounded chapter in the series.
— Rocco T. Thompson, Slant Magazine
Garland is genuinely interested in the absence and essence of God’s function, and his best writing continues to wrestle with those questions by asking them against the most pitiless environments he can imagine (while his worst writing continues to reverse-engineer a similar uncertainty from the stuff of real life).
— David Ehrlich, IndieWire
Garland seems unsure where to take this story.
— Rocco T. Thompson, Slant Magazine
Like 28 Years Later, the emphasis here is less on scariness than it is on the effect of being surrounded by it at all times… [It’s] the least scary yet most disquieting of the lot.
— David Ehrlich, IndieWire
I confess I found all the bloodletting and bombastic windbaggery more repugnant than scary or compelling.
— David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter
DaCosta makes sure everyone goes out in the grisliest way possible.
— Damon Wise, Deadline Hollywood Daily
The Bone Temple delivers enough carnage and ritual sacrifice to satiate the horror flock.
— David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter
Does the mega-donged alpha zombie Samson kick things off by ripping some poor bastard’s spine out of his body and feasting on the corpse’s gray matter while the rest of the infected snack on his flesh? Yes. Yes, he does.
— David Ehrlich, IndieWire
The undead carnage is nothing compared to the sorts of horrors inflicted by the Jimmies, whose interpretation of “charity” involves some graphic depictions of flaying.
— Liz Shannon Miller, Consequence
Fiennes is magnificent… He elevates the movie whenever he’s onscreen.
— David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter
Fiennes’s commando performance [is] a tour de force with so few f*cks given that the film’s astonishing, electrifying climax could put him back into the awards conversation.
— Damon Wise, Deadline Hollywood Daily
Fiennes delivers a deeply humane, quietly heartbreaking turn, grounding the film’s big ideas in personal grief and fragile hope.
— Linda Marric, HeyUGuys
O’Connell is genuinely terrifying, crafting a villain who is charismatic, cruel, and disturbingly funny.
— Linda Marric, HeyUGuys
He’s an instantly iconic horror villain who’s as fun to watch as he is necessary to root against.
— David Ehrlich, IndieWire
The intelligence glimmering behind his eyes makes him a truly terrifying villain.
— Liz Shannon Miller, Consequence
O’Connell confirms his villainous chops with a subtle variation on his Sinners role.
— Damon Wise, Deadline Hollywood Daily
While O’Connell is certainly persuasive as a disseminator of pain and dread with a malevolent glint in his eye, the actor did something similar more effectively in Sinners.
— David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter
The standout craft element here is a powerful horror score by Hildur Gudnadottir that ranges from solemn, quasi-ecclesiastical passages to gut-churning, droning soundscapes.
— David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter
The biggest flaw of The Bone Temple may be its positioning as not just a sequel, but the second part of what’s intended to be a trilogy… It doesn’t fully work as a standalone feature.
— Liz Shannon Miller, Consequence
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple doesn’t display the same bracing inventiveness and strangeness, shrinking the scope of the [previous] film down to a pinhole in what feels more like an incidental episode than a full-throated cinematic event in its own right.
— Rocco T. Thompson, Slant Magazine
Its weirdly timid anticlimax… resolves several of its storylines with an off-screen shrug.
— David Ehrlich, IndieWire
Part Three can’t come soon enough.
— Damon Wise, Deadline Hollywood Daily
The film plants the seeds for what comes next, subtly steering the franchise toward a forthcoming chapter designed as a more direct sequel to 28 Days Later. It’s handled with restraint and confidence, feeling earned rather than gimmicky.
— Linda Marric, HeyUGuys
The reintroduction of a legacy character feels like the only sensible way to carry on despite how obligatory that moment ultimately feels.
— Rocco T. Thompson, Slant Magazine
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple opens in theaters on January 16, 2026.
