There’s something about a zombie movie that can make even an easily frightened filmgoer—O.K., me—feel slightly better about their squeamishness. I still can’t watch Quint get eaten alive by the shark in “Jaws” (1975), but I will happily replay the climactic kill scene from “Day of the Dead” (1985), in which a highly hissable villain, Captain Rhodes, gets dismembered by a horde of the hungry undead. Is it the gristly, lip-smacking hilarity of the carnage—the taffy-like ease with which they pull Rhodes’s flesh apart, the way his bloody intestines spill forth like oversauced hot links—that helps it all go down so easily? Or is it the pleasure of knowing that, sometimes, the worst fates really do befall the worst people? Either way, George A. Romero, the late director of “Day of the Dead” and the acknowledged master of the American zombie thriller, understood how to turn a splattery feeding frenzy into a feast of moviemaking, with room for even the gore-averse at the table.

Romero’s work has influenced virtually every zombie movie since, although, in the case of the British thriller “28 Days Later” (2003), which was directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland, the deviations were pronounced. The “infected,” as Boyle’s zombies are known, carry a seemingly incurable rage virus, which has turned them into an army of sprinting, shrieking superspreaders—faster and more ferocious than the zombies who groan and shamble their way through Romero’s movies. The infected, with their speedy, out-of-nowhere assaults, brought a terrifying twenty-first-century urgency to “28 Days Later” and its sequel, “28 Weeks Later” (2007), directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. There was no “28 Months Later,” but eighteen years after the first sequel came “28 Years Later” (2025), a belated but highly effective follow-up that found Boyle reteaming with Garland, with no apparent loss in creative vigor or momentum. The question of what had become of England, almost three decades after the outbreak, provided startlingly fertile narrative ground.

Now we have a new film in the cycle, “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple,” which was written by Garland and shot immediately after the previous film, using many of the same actors, sets, and locations. Boyle has been replaced in the director’s chair, though, by the American filmmaker Nia DaCosta, a busy and wide-ranging talent. Her credits include the horror reboot “Candyman” (2021), which likely prepared her for this assignment in more ways than one; in both films, she evinces a healthy appetite for human guts and an aptitude for fleshing out another filmmaker’s dark world. Here, she revisits and enlarges the most striking fixture of Boyle’s landscape, the bone temple of the title. It’s a creepily elegant countryside ossuary—Bonehenge, more or less—with numerous skeletal pillars surrounding an enormous tower of skulls. (Carson McColl and Gareth Pugh conceived the marvellous production design and costumes for both films.)

We first encountered the temple and its madly ingenious architect, Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), partway through “28 Years Later,” and both are now proudly front and center. So, once again, is Spike (Alfie Williams), a plucky, soulful-eyed twelve-year-old, who was befriended by Ian in the previous film, and who was last seen being rescued from a pack of the infected by a strangely menacing benefactor, Jimmy (Jack O’Connell). For U.K. audiences, Jimmy, sporting a tracksuit and long blond hair, was a blatant reference to Jimmy Savile, a similarly styled British TV presenter posthumously found to have been a serial child abuser. Both “28 Years Later” movies are time capsules of this kind of British popular culture: a clip of “Teletubbies” figured prominently in the previous one, and this one thrums to the strains of Duran Duran and Iron Maiden.

In “The Bone Temple,” the full extent of Jimmy’s evil is revealed early on. So, too, is the range of O’Connell’s screen villainy, no less impressively showcased by his recent turn as a vampire in “Sinners.” Jimmy is a gleefully sadistic killer of the living and the undead alike, and a sworn son of Satan, as evidenced by the upside-down cross around his neck. His full name, he insists, is Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, which distinguishes him from the many other Jimmys who make up his band of murderous young disciples, known as the Fingers. (They go by Jimmy Fox, Jimmy Ink, Jimmy Jimmy, Jimmy Jones, Jimmy Snake, Jimmy Shite, and Jimmima.)

Spike is forced to become a Jimmy himself, by fighting one of the other Jimmys to the death and taking his place in the gang. It’s an ugly, ruthless, and nastily allusive scene. The Fingers are clearly modelled on the giggling, rampaging hooligans of “A Clockwork Orange” (1971), and their evil deeds feel at once consciously premeditated and merrily anarchic. They’re much worse, and more frightening, than anything the infected could unleash. All of which is to say that “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” is rather less of a zombie movie than expected. Attacks by the infected are few and far between, and most of the violence on display is meted out by the Jimmys. It brought my squeamishness back in full force. Most repellent of all is a slow-burn sequence in which the Jimmys, having stumbled on a small community of survivors, proceed to string them up in a barn and gradually, meticulously flay them alive. What makes your own skin crawl isn’t just the hideousness of the violence but the unblinking matter-of-factness with which DaCosta films it. She serves it straight up, without gusto—and does not leave you hungry for more.

DaCosta’s distinct visual touch is apparent from the opening scenes. Notably, she has reteamed with the British cinematographer Sean Bobbitt, who filmed her two previous features, the dynamic Ibsen adaptation “Hedda” (2025) and the middling superhero blockbuster “The Marvels” (2023). Gone are the smeary digital palette and whip-panning kineticism of “28 Years Later,” which was recognizably the product of Boyle’s long collaborations with the cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle and the editor Jon Harris. The frenzied, nerve-rattling energy of their techniques made sense; after so many years, they yanked us back into post-apocalyptic Britain with a bracingly nasty jolt. DaCosta, instead, incarnates a watchful stillness; hers is a statelier, more ominously composed doomsday vision. It’s as if, with the dystopian parameters duly established, she wanted us to tarry alongside the characters for a while and make ourselves properly uncomfortable.

Garland’s script is a study in extremes, toggling determinedly between visceral, stomach-churning horror and a more meditative, mind-altering register—the latter supplied almost entirely by Ralph Fiennes’s magnificently witty and poignant performance as Dr. Ian Kelson. When Ian was first introduced, in “28 Years Later,” his filthy, singlet-clad body caked in orange iodine (a natural rage-virus repellent), he popped up at the story’s close like a friendlier Colonel Kurtz, from “Apocalypse Now” (1979)—a scholarly, wild-eyed eccentric, who has tiptoed right up to the edge of crackpotdom but, miraculously, not fallen over it. This time, he’s a lead player from start to finish, and Fiennes teases out the fullness of the character—the pathos of his isolation, the brilliance of his intellect, and the fundamental generosity of his spirit—as only a great actor could. Ian is a record keeper, a meticulous preserver of the past. But he is also a guardian of a future that, despite all the death and suffering he’s seen, he is too much of an optimist to give up on.

To that end, Ian spends most of the new film getting blissfully high with a hulking zombie nudist (Chi Lewis-Parry), whom the good doctor has tamed into drugged-out submission and named Samson. Their stoner rapport—“The Bone Temple” is, at least partly, a zombie-hangout movie—enables Ian to study the rage virus up close and see if its effects might be treated or even reversed. Before too long, Samson begins to achieve a measure of sentience, which makes him an outlier character in a very Romero vein: an evolved zombie, who regains humanizing vestiges of his pre-undead memory and even rediscovers certain rudimentary powers of communication. The character brilliantly crystallizes Garland and DaCosta’s most rigorously developed theme: the crippling loss of identity and individual purpose that the zombie pandemic has engendered among the masses, living and undead alike.

It’s no surprise, then, that Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal dominates his Fingers by making them take his name and wear blond wigs and colored tracksuits to mimic his appearance. Or that the young Spike, terrified of being killed by his new companions, will only survive, morally, if he clings fiercely to the knowledge of who he truly is. Several important new characters—including a pregnant woman (Mirren Mack) who fights back against the Jimmys with ingenuity and courage—are never clearly introduced by name, and the unfathomably vicious deaths that await most of them seem only to compound their anonymity. Elsewhere, certain names are not taken away but bestowed, with a totemic, quasi-religious power: it is Samson’s superhuman strength and long, luxuriant hair that inspire Ian to call him that. Jimmy refers to the Devil, his alleged father, by the more casual moniker Old Nick.

The movie develops these ideas, with thrillingly demented showmanship, into a doozy of a third act, built on two cleverly intertwined cases of mistaken identity. One person must pass himself off as someone he isn’t, and another person, his face concealed by a mask, desperately seeks to be recognized for who he is. Remarkably, what holds these dual illusions together is a performance of singular self-awareness. Watching Fiennes merrily cavort his way through the closing passages, I was reminded of some of his more memorable characters from the past two decades: the spectrally terrifying Voldemort, from the “Harry Potter” movies, but also Harry Hawkes, the incorrigible hedonist who rudely crashes the party in Luca Guadagnino’s thriller “A Bigger Splash” (2016). Fiennes’s work here is the definition of a hard act to follow, but it will be followed: the tantalizing final moments of “The Bone Temple” promise another installment, one that will almost certainly bring the whole twenty-eight-year-long story full circle. Certain franchises, too, must overcome their long-term crises of identity; this one, for all its jarring mutations, hasn’t forgotten what it is. ♦