Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later remains a thrilling, punk rock slice of horror, and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later, is better than its reputation suggests. Fans waited a long time for a third entry, and it arrived last year to critical and commercial acclaim – but I’m not a fan.

I’m in the minority, I know, but Boyle’s return to the franchise is a disappointment, thanks in large part to that little shit Spike, who I was hoping would bite it at every turn. (Don’t get me started.)

My feelings towards that film left me a bit apathetic towards 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, so I skipped it in theaters (along with most audiences, apparently)… only to absolutely love it when I finally watched it on VOD. This makes me part of the problem, I know, and I’m very sorry. Nia DaCosta delivers an incredibly beautiful and thrilling entry into the franchise – that’s also one of 2026’s best films – and I’ve already watched it three times.

Now keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)

Commentator: Nia DaCosta (director)

1. While previous films in the franchise opened with scenes that led to the title chyron, they decided to go with an audio soundscape here instead. It builds to a single word, “Hello?” which is taken from Jim (Cillian Murphy) in the first film. “That’s Jim’s voice from 28 Days Later when he’s holding his little plastic bag and looking for people in the streets of London.”

2. The sign saying “No children beyond this point” was added for a laugh.

3. Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) was scripted to be wearing a blue Adidas tracksuit, but O’Connell suggested the purple velour one instead.

4. The opening scene with Spike (Alfie Williams) fighting for his life was filmed in a leisure center that had shut down during the pandemic. “But when you go in there, it felt like it had been shut down for 28 years.” It was chosen because DaCosta wanted it to feel whimsical and childlike on the outside but rotted and dying within – just like the Jimmies.

5. She doesn’t typically employ whip pans in her films, but their Trinity camera operator, Simon Wood, had made some modifications to the rig that allowed for pans that “slam to a stop really directly on either side of the whip.” She felt the madness of a whip pan met the madness of the Jimmies.

6. It was important to DaCosta that this be the only sequel in the series (so far) that doesn’t start with a scene featuring the infected. “It shows we’re sort of shifting what we’re saying about this world, which is that the infected, at this point, are just part of the flora and fauna.”

7. She had asked O’Connell to do something to mark Jimmy Shite’s (Connor Newall) death by doing something with his soul, and he came up with this bit at 6:01, where he takes it and releases it into the air above. Between the added sound effect and Jimmy Jones’ (Maura Bird) look upward, it’s one of her favorite beats in the film.

8. The scene with Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) cleaning bones only to find a moth on one came about because Fiennes found it and added it himself. DaCosta loves it as “moths made me think of death and renewal, so it was a nice thematic little guy.”

9. DaCosta and Fiennes discussed the scene in Kelson’s bunker where he strips down, and they agreed that “him being completely naked and alone and vulnerable, it just shows how sad it all is. This is all he has, and he’s just a man.”

10. She often kept the camera running during Kelson’s scenes because Fiennes would often add little beats. One comes at 18:24 when Kelson touches Sampson’s (Chi Lewis-Parry) shoulder after darting him. “So much of what you see between them in the film that’s action or them interacting” is stuff that was captured off script.

11. DaCosta really only knew Duran Duran for the songs “Hungry Like the Wolf” and “Girls on Film,” but she’s since become a big fan. “Ordinary World” is a new favorite of hers and one she sings all the time.

12. She names a character Jane Ji in all of her movies, as it’s the name of one of her best friends.

13. DaCosta was entertained but initially confused when she first read Alex Garland’s script pages for the scene at the 32:00 mark. “Alex, what are you talking about, babe?” she recalls thinking before getting it. “It’s really fun to see, in a movie like this, something so strange happening that has nothing to do with violence.”

14. They made gradual changes to Samson’s look as the film progresses to highlight his shift back towards humanity. He becomes less monstrous on the surface to mirror the changes within.

15. “My jaw dropped when I read that in the script,” she says after Samson utters “moon.” The scene is about mercy and loss, leading Kelson towards surrender, but that one word renews his drive and the connection between two people.

16. She’s impressed by everyone on her production team, but she’s especially wowed by the stunt performer who does the fire gag in the barn. He had to be lit on fire three times, each time getting lathered up with the gel, putting on the costume and mask, and getting lathered up again. One thing DaCosta learned was that performers have to hold their breath while they burn so that they don’t inhale the flames.

17. “And that’s the last we see of Cathy (Mirren Mack) for this movie, but she will return,” says DaCosta with absolute certainty that we’re getting the third film of the trilogy. (I hope she’s right!)

18. Samson is nude throughout the script, but DaCosta wanted to show those visual hints of his re-awakening humanity. One was him turning his palm up to the rain, and another was turning cloth into clothes and wiping his berry-stained fingers on it.

19. She made sure to find moments that highlighted just how much of an idiot Crystal is “because that’s how I feel about these kinds of leaders.” “Usually with a cult leader or a garbage president or prime minister,” she adds, “the way that they get people to follow them isn’t necessarily that they’re intelligent in any way, shape or form. It’s charisma and power, and when you look at those people outside of that context, you also see how silly they are.”

20. DaCosta is a big fan of how Garland’s script “continues to explore the infection and what it means.” The scene where Kelson explains and administers his hopeful psychotropic concoction to Samson touches on the distinction between zombie films and rage-virus stories like this – the people are still inside the infected, and while death can’t be cured (sorry, Herbert West!), a virus possibly could be.

21. She sees the train in the film as similar to the mall in Dawn of the Dead. “Where do I go? Back to the thing that I have the strongest memory of?” For Samson, that thing is a train like the one where he was first infected.

22. DaCosta cameos very briefly as a train passenger during the flashback at 1:20:20. “I’m in this movie for some reason on the left there.”

23. She recalls reaching the point in the script where Kelson puts on his devilish show to Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast,” and thinking, “How the hell is this gonna work?” She figured it would either ruin her career or become a defining scene, and happily, it instantly became the latter.

24. The sequence saw them using the Lensbaby during Kelson’s show. “It’s just a lens that is so inconsistent, and you just get that blurriness that you see there.” She said she wanted it “to feel like kids moshing at a concert,” an experience that is wholly new to them, given the situation of the world, but here it’s them communing with the devil.

25. That’s a performer named Otto doing the end bit in the protective outfit and fire-spitting barbell. DaCosta worried at first that it might be too much, but she ultimately realized it fit both the scene and the song perfectly.

26. Williams was a minor during production, meaning they only had three hours per night to film with him. So, pretty much anytime you see him from behind or in the mask, it’s actually his stand-in, a young woman named Jess Bell.

27. “At whose expense do you enjoy your freedom?” is something she asks and sees as a theme here, as Kelson realizes what letting Crystal go could mean for others. Fiennes does great work showing that internal dialogue, and it’s only when he realizes Spike is there that he falls completely on one side with his answer. “And that’s why Kelson’s a really good person.”

28. She sees Spike’s journey as part coming of age as he ends the first film thinking he needs to be on his own, but ends this one knowing that he needs other people to survive. He’s basically the prodigal son who goes out to see the world but eventually returns home, “so maybe we’ll see some of that in the third film.”

29. “Nothing is, no one is, there’s just us, is also my belief system,” she says regarding Kelson’s reply to Jimmy Ink (Erin Kellyman) asking if he’s Satan. “That’s beautiful.”

30. The music from Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon was something of a reference point for her in conversations with this film’s composer, Hildur Guðnadóttir.

31. They went back to the exact same house from the finale of 28 Days Later. “It was so cool. The same people live in the house, the house is exactly the same.” She was equally excited to be the one who got to bring Jim back for the first time.

Quotes Without Context

“Thank you, Sony, for your money.”

“I really like special effects, especially when they have to do with cuts or blood or gore, I think it’s really fun.”

“I really hate VFX blood cause it looks so fake.”

“Ralph Fiennes is an icon of our times and a national treasure.”

“That shot before was the real woman, and this is the dummy, obviously, because we can’t just be throwing women off of cliffs anymore.”

“Seeing all that brain in his beard is truly… I can’t look at it.”

“We see him in the first movie, and he seems like this whimsical sort of kook who’s like ‘I’m gonna kill your mom.’”

“Since he’s so lonely, he’s like ‘Let me go talk to that one guy I met,’ which I love for him.”

“One of several shots where we’re like, ‘Let’s just crop out the penis.’”

“Like what is up with their vocal cords, bro?”

“So much oatmeal water we used as vomit in this film.”

“It’s given her a bit of a hate boner for people who underestimate her.”

“Basically, this whole scene to me is like that children’s book, Are You My Mother? Where the baby bird’s talking to all these inanimate objects and other animals, looking for his mom.”

Keep up with more horror commentary breakdowns here.