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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:
How does it compare to the other 28 Days Later movies?
It’s very rare for a fourquel to be the best film in a franchise, but that’s how things stand with the chequered 28 Days Later series.
— Peter Bradshaw, Guardian
28 Days Later: The Bone Temple is certainly the nastiest and possibly the best of the series.
— Damon Wise, Deadline Hollywood Daily
Compared to the earlier films in the series, including the more straightforward outlier 28 Weeks Later, DaCosta’s contribution feels the most polished.
— Peter Debruge, Variety
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
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is not only better than its predecessor, it’s one of the first great movies of 2026.
— Kristen Lopez, The Film Maven
It’s through the characters and their morally grey journeys and conflicts that bring The Bone Temple closest to the original film 28 Days Later.
— Meagan Navarro, Bloody Disgusting
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
(Photo by Miya Mizuno/©Sony Pictures Releasing)What does this movie do best?
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
Bone Temple is the best for an interesting reason – because the zombies are almost entirely irrelevant and are at a minimum.
— Peter Bradshaw, Guardian
The sequence that had the audience in my screening not only awestruck during, but then applauding and cheering afterwards, was one of dance. It was an extraordinary surprise, and the thrill of it still surges in my heart and stings my eyes with tears for the sheer excitement.
— Kristy Puchko, Mashable
One sequence at the movie’s climax… inspired a full-out applause break from a theater full of critics.
— Liz Shannon Miller, Consequence
Its finale, whose unholy heavy-metal majesty is so jaw-droppingly awesome that it’s bound to elicit outright cheers in the theater.
— Nick Schager, The Daily Beast
Is Nia DaCosta a great director for the franchise?
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
She pulls off the challenge of imbuing importance into an inherently meaningless film with aplomb. She does so through incredible spectacle.
— Robert Daniels, RogerEbert.com
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
DaCosta helms The Bone Temple with confidence and flair.
— Nick Schager, The Daily Beast
(Photo by Miya Mizuno/©Sony Pictures Releasing)How does the movie look?
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
Does it have a good script?
Garland’s script is rich with ideas about faith and reason, sadism and compassion, selfishness and sacrifice, and mortality and renewal, and it tackles them with bracing, live-wire unpredictability.
— Nick Schager, The Daily Beast
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
None of the characters feel like fleshed-out people, and the plot lacks any momentum toward an emotional catharsis.
— Robert Daniels, RogerEbert.com
(Photo by Miya Mizuno/©Sony Pictures Releasing)Is it scary?
There are scenes of zombie carnage and human depravity, in keeping with the franchise’s toll of blood. And these are deeply unnerving.
— Kristy Puchko, Mashable
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
The Bone Temple turns out to be far more bloody than the earlier films in the franchise, stoking shock and fear from gratuitous acts of sadism perpetrated by Jimmy Crystal and his gang.
— Peter Debruge, Variety
I confess I found all the bloodletting and bombastic windbaggery more repugnant than scary or compelling.
— David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter
How are the kills?
DaCosta makes sure everyone goes out in the grisliest way possible.
— Damon Wise, Deadline Hollywood Daily
The film turns the bleakness, bloodiness, and brutality up to 11.
— Robert Daniels, RogerEbert.com
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
(Photo by Miya Mizuno/©Sony Pictures Releasing)Does Ralph Fiennes give another great performance?
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 goes for broke with this role, playing Kelson as lonely, funny, and bats–t insane.
— Kristen Lopez, The Film Maven
Fiennes delivers a deeply humane, quietly heartbreaking turn, grounding the film’s big ideas in personal grief and fragile hope.
— Linda Marric, HeyUGuys
With him, the film rises close to the level of its predecessors.
— Robert Daniels, RogerEbert.com
Fiennes’s dance to Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast” is basically one of the most extraordinary moments of his career.
— Peter Bradshaw, Guardian
What about Jack O’Connell’s villain?
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
Between this and Sinners, Jack O’Connell is becoming one of the great villain actors.
— Kristen Lopez, The Film Maven
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
(Photo by Miya Mizuno/©Sony Pictures Releasing)How is the music?
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 music [by Hildur Gudnadottir] swarms to emphasize mounting fear, fury, or even bliss.
— Kristy Puchko, Mashable
There’s plenty of good music in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, including Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place” and one of the most gloriously unhinged uses of Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast” ever conceived.
— Mark Kennedy, Associated Press
Are there any major problems with the movie?
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
The hardest part to stomach about 28 Years: The Bone Temple is its meaninglessness… The question of how this part relates to the whole overwhelms the integrity of the part.
— Robert Daniels, RogerEbert.com
Its weirdly timid anticlimax… resolves several of its storylines with an off-screen shrug.
— David Ehrlich, IndieWire
Will it leave us hungry for more?
Part Three can’t come soon enough.
— Damon Wise, Deadline Hollywood Daily
I’m ready for another 10 of these movies.
— Kristen Lopez, The Film Maven
There’s a fifth movie in this franchise in the works, with some clues that this nightmarish world may yet produce a happy ending. But they’re getting better and better and, as insane as it sounds, it’s going to be sad to see it go.
— Mark Kennedy, Associated Press
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
One does somewhat wish the film committed to leaving us cold rather than offering the warm glimmer of a further sequel.
— Robert Daniels, RogerEbert.com
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple opens in theaters on January 16, 2026.
English (US) ·