TL;DR: A feral, funny, stomach-turning sequel that swaps “run from the infected” panic for “run from the humans” dread, then spikes it with a weird little tenderness you don’t expect to survive the first act. It lands because DaCosta keeps the cruelty intimate and Garland turns the franchise’s rage into a sick parable about faith, power, and mercy.

Spike is out in the open now, no island rules, no comforting mythology, just the raw, ugly math of staying alive. He’s Alfie Williams’ wide-eyed survivor kid, and in this chapter he’s less “hero with a quest” and more “decent human being trapped inside a traveling nightmare.” That nightmare has a name, a wig, and a velvet tracksuit: Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), leading a cult of copycat “Jimmys” who treat the apocalypse like a costume party with a body count. The film picks up right after Spike falls into their orbit, and quickly makes it clear this gang isn’t quirky comic relief. They’re the kind of people who turn violence into ritual, then call it charity with a straight face.

Spike is forcibly folded into Jimmy Crystal’s roaming cult, where obedience is earned through blood and humiliation. Meanwhile Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), iodine-smeared, half prophet and half physician, keeps running experiments on Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), an Alpha infected he can temporarily pacify with morphine-tipped blow darts. Spike wants out. Kelson wants answers. Jimmy wants dominion. The problem is they’re all moving through the same ruined landscape, and collision is inevitable.

The film’s inversion of franchise expectations continues to captivate. The infected still do their head-ripping, spine-yanking chaos, sure, but the real horror is watching people manufacture meaning from wreckage and then use it to justify cruelty. Jimmy’s cult theology is basically “apocalypse cosplay as governance,” and O’Connell sells it with the kind of charm that makes you hate yourself for laughing. The film’s sharpest trick is how it makes language itself feel contaminated: “charity,” “duty,” “salvation,” all these words get dragged through the mud until they’re just props for control.

Then, against all odds, the film gives you a fragile thread of compassion through Kelson and Samson. The morphine doesn’t just knock Samson down, it keeps pulling him back, like addiction as accidental diplomacy. Their relationship shouldn’t work, but it does, because Fiennes plays Kelson as a man who’s been alone so long he’ll offer “peace and respite” to a monster if it means one quiet moment by a river. It’s grim and oddly sweet, like somebody tried to smuggle a sad little buddy-movie into a splatter-soaked sermon.

Nia DaCosta’s direction is tighter and less showy than the maximalist chaos you associate with Boyle, and that’s a good thing for this material. She understands that gore is only interesting when it has intention, and she stages violence like a pressure point. The movie’s best scares come from withholding: faces reacting, shapes moving just out of focus, the camera refusing to “reward” you with the full view until your brain has already invented something worse. When it does go big, it goes big in the most unhinged way possible, like Kelson turning his bone-built memorial into performance art. You get this cracked, unforgettable crescendo where Fiennes basically becomes a possessed rock star to Iron Maiden, and it’s simultaneously hilarious, terrifying, and weirdly tragic, like the world ended and theater kids still found a stage.

The soundtrack needle-drops are doing thematic work too as opposed to just vibes. Kelson singing “Girls on Film” while dragging corpses through his ossuary routine is both bleak and pointed. This movie is constantly asking: what do you preserve when everything else burns? Bones? Songs? Rituals? Or just the power to hurt someone first?

DaCosta’s best work has always been about atmosphere and social rot. She broke out with Little Woods (2018), then went mythic and urban-horror with Candyman (2021), and later jumped into studio machinery with The Marvels (2023). The Bone Temple feels like her snapping back into genre control: patient tension, sharp compositions, and a willingness to let ugliness sit in the room. Alex Garland, meanwhile, is the guy who can’t stop writing about systems, belief, and what humans do when the rules collapse, whether it’s 28 Days Later, Ex Machina, Annihilation, Men, or Civil War. This script feels like Garland returning to the franchise with a meaner grin and a softer heart in the same breath.

The big thematic engine is faith versus fact, not as debate club, but as survival strategy. Jimmy’s satanic pageantry is what happens when charisma replaces structure. Kelson’s science is what happens when structure collapses but curiosity refuses to die. Layered under that is addiction and dependency: morphine as a temporary cure, morphine as a leash, morphine as the only peace left in a screaming world. If mercy can be weaponized, and violence can be sanctified, what the hell does “good” even mean when civilization is gone?

This continues in the wake of 28 Years Later, serving as another rare franchise sequel that feels like an escalation in ideas, not just bodies. It plays like the trilogy’s sharp hinge: it deepens the infected mythology through Samson and reframes the apocalypse as an argument about power, belief, and language. It also clearly sets the table for the planned final film, with the series poised to swing back toward its roots.

A vicious, weirdly soulful sequel that proves this franchise can still mutate into something uglier and smarter, with DaCosta’s control and Garland’s thematic knives cutting deeper than the infected ever could.

Directed by Nia DaCosta.
Written by Alex Garland.
Released January 16, 2026 by Columbia Pictures.