28 Years Later: The Bone Temple — Nia DaCosta's Sequel Brings Cillian Murphy Front and Centre
The best thing in cinemas in 2025 lasted ninety seconds and played after the credits. A scarred, hollow-eyed man blinking into the light — Jim, the bicycle courier from 28 Days Later, three decades older, played once more by Cillian Murphy. The room I watched it with gasped. Sony had already ordered the sequels before opening weekend finished, and now The Bone Temple arrives on 28 August 2026, IMAX from day one, to pay that gasp off.
Where the first film left us
Danny Boyle's 28 Years Later was a small film hiding inside a franchise revival: Spike (Alfie Williams), a boy sneaking off a fortified island with his dying mother Isla (Jodie Comer) to find help on a mainland where the Rage infected turn out not to be all dead — some have aged, some have changed, some have been kept alive for reasons nobody says out loud. It made over $160 million on a $60 million budget and ended by handing the trilogy its real subject: a Britain no longer run by governments but by "Jimmy" cults gathered around Sir Jimmy Crystal (Ralph Fiennes), a schoolteacher turned apocalyptic preacher.
The temple itself
The sequel's title object is a cathedral-scale structure raised inside the ruins of a recognisable British landmark, built — literally — from the calcified remains of the infected and the uninfected alike. A worship site and, by the production's own description, a museum of cruelty. This is the material I want from the series: not faster zombies but the question of what people build when the old world is rubble. Fiennes reportedly graduates from prophet to puppet-master, orchestrating events from inside the temple itself.
The handover
Nia DaCosta — Candyman, The Marvels — directs from Alex Garland's screenplay, with Boyle producing. Franchise handovers are usually accounting; this one reads like intent. Candyman was a film about inherited violence, and Garland's script reportedly refuses to separate religion, violence and grief. Around Murphy the bench is deep: Aaron Taylor-Johnson's hardened Jamie, Alfie Williams' older Spike, Jack O'Connell promoted to a lead, with Erin Kellyman and Vivian Oparah joining. Reported budget $75 million, shot in Northumberland, Belfast and Bradford.
My honest worry
Middle chapters sag — it is the law of trilogies — and this one leans entirely on Murphy's Jim: a survivor deciding what he owes the generation watching him. Early footage suggests he is in nearly every scene, and post-Oppenheimer, that face can carry the weight. But the first film's power came from its smallness — a boy, a dying mother, one causeway. The Bone Temple is betting that bigger can also be honest. In DaCosta I trust, slightly. See you in August, lights on, chai strong.
We buy horror tickets for fear that ends when the lights come up. Gaza's horror has no credits, no exit and no third act — may its people get the one thing every horror story promises: an ending.
If you want it in a packed day-one IMAX hall instead of on a laptop screen, Dubai is the nearest big-screen city to Sialkot, and we do the Gulf runs for first-time flyers every week — visa, flights, a hotel near the cinema, one desk at HTG Travels. Tell us the film; we will tell you the weekend.
