28 Years Later: The Bone Temple – ‘a macabre morality tale’

Ralph Fiennes in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

Ralph Fiennes plays a doctor who is ‘inching ever closer to a cure for the zombie virus’

(Image credit: Alamy / Prod DB / Sony Pictures)

It’s rare for the fourth instalment in a franchise to be the best film in it, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. “But that’s how things stand with the chequered ‘28 Days Later’ series.” In this “exciting” chapter – written, like all its predecessors, by Alex Garland – the plot picks up where the last film left off, with Britain long-since overwhelmed by a pandemic that has turned most of its population into zombies.

Twelve-year-old survivor Spike (Alfie Williams) is taken in by a “murderous Clockwork-Orangey gang of non-infected people” who call themselves “Jimmies”, and whose tracksuits and blond wigs are modelled, somewhat unexpectedly, on Jimmy Savile. Meanwhile, a doctor played by Ralph Fiennes, who lives in “an ossuary-monument” to those killed in the pandemic, is inching ever closer to a cure for the zombie virus. It all makes for a “forthright, energised” film in which “there is real human jeopardy and conflict” and, be warned, serious gore.

The sight of Fiennes’ iodine-stained doctor getting high on morphine with a zombie while “dancing atop a hill to Duran Duran’s Rio” is magnificently weird, said Tom Shone in The Times. But Fiennes’ “sinewy performance” is pretty much the only reason to see this “thinly clever, unpleasant film”. Its characters are “so utterly repellent you actually want them to get eaten by zombies”, and its plot is “so slender you could perch it on a dandelion head”.