Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
To the list of distinguished actors playing it absolutely straight and hard in horror cinema, let us pause to carve Ralph Fiennes' name in bold strokes—preferably in bleached bone. Fiennes came through admirably in the first 28 Years Later movie, and has even more to do in the sequel.
And The Bone Temple is indeed a sequel, although, as promised, it doesn't so much directly follow the main thread of Danny Boyle's 2025 release as it stakes out a different mood and emphasis, while tracking a bunch of the same characters.
Chief among those returning characters is adolescent Spike (Alfie Williams), here conscripted into the depraved army of "Sir" Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Conner), self-styled son of Satan and leader of an outlaw band that divides its time between terrorizing humans and fending off zombies. (All the members of his gang are called Jimmy.) Fiennes returns as Doctor Kelson, who has created a countryside Angkor Wat made entirely of human bones, a memorial that occupies him as he tinkers with a formula that might help the infected. His tentative partner in this is the most fearsome of the infected, Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), a dead-eyed giant. Kelson and Samson are a wonderful couple in the wasteland; the doctor a purified essence of personhood, the zombie a hairy impulse-beast who is both Tarzan and Adam—when Samson finds a glimmer of consciousness, he adopts a loincloth to cover his previously unchecked genitalia.
Upon arriving at key moments, the movie carries real power. Without spoiling anything, these include the doctor making a significant decision about Samson's curability, and the way the film's two narratives finally come together, which involves a faux-satanic ceremony and an Iron Maiden album that somehow survived the holocaust. Some of those sequences build so well that by comparison, a lot of the first 40 minutes feels like treading water, during which a variety of gruesome methods of slaughter are detailed. Director Nia DaCosta quite rightly works in a different style from Boyle, a more classical mode that makes space for the actors to create complicated performances. Jack O'Connell, for instance—seen here extending his touch with deranged dancing beyond his role in Sinners—is a genuinely frightening bully. You could argue that the movie enjoys his antics a little too much, but the actor himself gives off fireworks.
With Fiennes, the immense craft of the British acting tradition suits the character perfectly; he's a Shakespearian who wandered into the world of George Romero, and concluded that this isn't so far from Titus Andronicus anyway. (Think of Kelson as Hamlet and Yorick combined into one person.) Covered with blood, and with his skin tinted orange thanks to his ingestion of infection-slowing iodine, Fiennes's doctor is a walking testament to the value of being human. And because of Fiennes' skill at leveling his blue eyes out of his boney, bloody skull and surveying the world with infinite sympathy, we believe in that value, too.
January 16, 2026
