28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)

The fourth instalment in a franchise that began with bicycle couriers and rage arrives in the hands of Nia DaCosta, who was handed the keys and told, apparently, to make something personal. What she has made is a film about evil, satanic cults in Northumberland, and the slow re-humanisation of a large infected man through morphine and Duran Duran. Ralph Fiennes covers himself in iodine and builds an ossuary. Jack O'Connell styles his gang after Jimmy Savile, which is the sort of detail that lands with the weight of a falling cathedral. The gore is plentiful, the dread is thick, and the whole enterprise has the confidence of a film that knows its audience arrived voluntarily.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a curious specimen. The ensemble is notably diverse for a British apocalypse, and Erin Kellyman carries a co-lead with real conviction. One member of the Fingers is described as non-binary, a detail offered without ceremony. The women, Jimmima and Cathy among them, are granted violent agency and narrative consequence. None of this is staged as argument. The film has no interest in race as a subject, no ecological reading of its own catastrophe (the virus is man-made, the planet is merely the venue), and no economic critique to speak of. The antagonists are devil worshippers. There is no corporation to eat.

The film's sins are aesthetic and theological, not ideological. Evil is dramatised through skinning, crucifixion, and a pyrotechnic Iron Maiden number, which is a form of instruction, though delivered with a flamethrower instead of a lectern. Only the closing history lesson, delivered by Cillian Murphy's returning survivor to his daughter, gestures toward a thesis. It lasts a moment. The rest is a well-made, genuinely unnerving piece of work that resists the urge to tell us what to think, and for that we can be grateful.