We Already Have a Contender for the Best Movie of 2026

It’s barely halfway through January, and already we have a contender for the best film of 2026. On balance, Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a sequel to one of the very best and most underrated movies of 2025, so maybe we’re biased. However, you’d have to be extremely hard-hearted not to be dazzled by this gonzo dystopian vision. It’s an intensely propellant, ideologically dense, and probably genuinely punk rock piece of work.

Bone Temple Picks Up Moments After the End of 28 Years Later

In 28 Years Later, young Spike (Alfie Williams, a galvanic young star) ventured with his mother (Jodie Comer) to the mainland, braving those infected with the rage virus to find Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), a former doctor who may have a cure for her unnamed malady. After losing his mother and escaping Kelson’s compound, Spike found himself inducted into the gang of Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), a demented zombie hunter with a Manson-esque cult of psychopathic followers.

The Bone Temple picks up moments after 28 Years Later’s finale, a tonally offbeat sequence in which Jimmy’s gang lays waste to a group of infected with crazy parkour moves. DaCosta’s sequel more or less sidesteps the stylistic extravagance of that controversial final sequence, dropping us into an idiosyncratic and surprisingly brutal scenario. Forced to fight one of Jimmy’s gang members to the death, Spike gains initiation into the group but soon finds himself trying to escape. Whilst Kelson develops an unexpected bond with “Alpha” zombie Samson (Chi-Lewis Parry) and comes across a most unexpected potential for a treatment, Sir Jimmy decides that the doctor may be able to trick his brainwashed followers into further manipulation.

Sequel Fulfills the Promise of Its Predecessor

28 Years Later was a hard act to follow, but The Bone Temple does an excellent job of filling its shoes. It’s more or less equal to Boyle’s film. It’s not as visually ambitious, and it lacks its pure white-knuckle suspense; but it’s more thematically rich and narratively fulfilling. The Bone Temple also avoids the first film’s tendency to overexplain itself. Garland’s screenplay works in tandem with the direction to weave a complicated and dense narrative which is never tiresome or didactic and moves quicker than a bullet.

DaCosta has noted on several occasions that The Bone Temple offered her a safe space to let her freak flag fly, and it’s a tremendous relief to see the filmmaker finally making good on the immense promise of her debut feature, Little Woods (2018). DaCosta’s previous two big-budget studio plays, the peculiarly cobbled-together Candyman (2021) and Marvel punching bang The Marvels (2023), were victims of studio interference; but The Bone Temple is the emphatic work of an auteur allowed to have free rein. Just a few months after Hedda, a Tessa Thompson-led adaptation of Hedda Gabler which debuted on Prime Video last October, proved DaCosta still had much clout in the indie arena, here she proves herself equally adept at handling blockbusters. 

One of the most exceptional aspects of 28 Years Later was the anomalous score by Scottish hip-hop group Young Fathers. At first, it’s a shame that the artists are replaced in Bone Temple with a rather unexciting and generic orchestral score by Hildur Guðnadóttir, But this is quickly redeemed by the dexterous use of jukebox hits. Fiennes, having a ball as the demented GP, anchors not one but two drop-dead brilliant musical moments, dancing with Samson to Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World” and, in the film’s most eclectic and accomplished sequence, performing a Satanic fire dance to Iron Maiden’s “Number of the Beast."

Franchise is a High Watermark in Modern Horror

It’s fairly jaw-dropping how brilliant these recent 28 Years Later movies have been. It’s unlikely that anyone, upon hearing the franchise would return two decades on, would have predicted that they would be so artistically successful. They’re two of the most transgressive, heartfelt, gruesome, and edgy movies released by a major studio in recent years. That they were made at all seems like a miracle, and that we’re getting a third is a cherry on top. It’s yet another notch in the belt of Sony’s surprisingly lucrative internal “auteur horror” push, the fruits of which will likely see the studio’s Sinners pick up a rash of Oscar nominations in just a few weeks. Long may it continue.