Dr Kelson will see you now.

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland might have forged the template for the modern sprinting infected, but in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, it’s Nia DaCosta who truly vivisects the decaying soul of this utterly broken Britain.

Picking up immediately after the previous film’s jarring conclusion, we join 28 Years Later’s breakout young Spike (Alfie Williams) forcibly inducted into the ‘Jimmys’, a marauding cult of tracksuit-clad nihilists led by the charismatic, tiara-wearing Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), self-proclaimed anti-Christ on a mission to deliver survivors of the Rage to damnation in his father’s kingdom. While Spike endures the visceral horror of the gang’s dysangelical mission, a half-remembered toxic cocktail of childhood trauma, pre-outbreak pop culture and satanic mythology, Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) makes a startling discovery about the local ‘Alpha’ Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry). To the soundtrack of Duran Duran’s greatest hits, Kelson embarks on a medical experiment that could change the world as we’ve come to know it.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about DaCosta’s The Bone Temple is how little attention it pays to the infected. Sure, there are a few perfunctory scenes early on to remind us that they’re still lurking everywhere but in a very real sense, this is the apotheosis of the oldest of all zombie movie (and yes, I said what I said, the Rage movies are zombie movies) tropes: people are the real monsters. Here, DaCosta and Garland take that concept to its logical end point and present us with a movie where people prey on people against a distant backdrop of flesh eating infected. That they weave this into a contrarian confrontation between dogmatic theological certainty against an enduring faith in science is the crowning achievement of this beautifully horrifying and horrifyingly beautiful film.

The magnitude of Ralph Fiennes’ contribution to this franchise cannot be overstated. His Dr Kelson is a performance of such eccentric, weathered brilliance that he effectively recalibrates the film’s – and the franchise’s entire emotional frequency. Eschewing the frantic, wide-eyed desperation typical of the genre, Fiennes brings a still, iodine-stained dignity to a man who has spent nearly three decades tending to a monument to the dead. His Kelson is not merely a scientist; he is a philosopher-monk who treats the infected not as monsters to be dispatched, but as broken vessels to be understood. The sequence in which he bonds with the hulking Samson, tranquillising the beast only to share a drug-addled, hallucinatory dance to one of the movie’s many Duran Duran needle drops is incredible to watch in and of itself but pales in comparison to Feinne’s tour de force staging of Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast, perhaps the most audacious and moving moment in the series’ history. Fiennes moves with a wiry, unpredictable grace, his performance capturing a man who has not only stared into the abyss but decided to invite it to tea; a turn that demands attention, elevating the film’s scientific subplots into a gripping exploration of what remains of the human spirit when the world has been silent for twenty-eight years.

Opposite Kelson’s quiet nobility, The Bone Temple pits the high-octane madness of Jack O’Connell’s Jimmy Crystal. O’Connell is predictably electric, portraying a cult leader who has filled the void of a lost civilization with the aesthetics of a bargain-bin tracksuit and a bastardised version of a (to us) disgraced DJ’s persona. The ‘Jimmys’ represent a terrifying evolution of the ‘in-group’ survivalist mentality; a generation raised in Darwinian fashion on the bones of a world they never knew, led by a man who uses ‘charity’ as a euphemism for murdering survivors in as sadistic a manner possible. O’Connell’s performance pulses with an erratic, dangerous humour that makes the group’s ‘Howzat!’ salutes feel more chilling than any guttural roar from the infected and he’s never more terrifying than when his certainties start to crumble and he finds himself backed into a theological corner. Alfie Williams continues to impress as Spike, serving as the audience’s shell-shocked conduit through this landscape of ritualistic violence, but he is largely a passenger to the ideological collision between Crystal’s nihilism and Kelson’s persistent, scientific empathy, finding a modicum of solace in Erin Kellyman’s Jimmy Ink, one of Crystal’s disciples who nurtures doubts of her own.

Director Nia DaCosta brings a newfound patience and visual elegance to the proceedings, trading the frenetic, digital grain of the earlier films for the sharp, evocative textures provided by cinematographer Sean Bobbitt. The Bone Temple itself – a macabre, towering sculpture of human remains – is a stunning piece of production design that serves as a constant, looming reminder of the film’s core themes of mortality and legacy. DaCosta’s direction allows the audience to sit with the characters, finding beauty in the stark North Yorkshire landscapes and the flickering orange light of Kelson’s bunker, the shift in pace not diminishing the impact of the violence; rather making the eruptions of gore, such as Samson’s brutal, spine-ripping reintroduction, feel all the more significant because they punctuate a story that actually takes the time to breathe.

Garland’s screenplay is characteristically sharp, using the cult of the Jimmys to examine how quickly shared trauma putrefies into fanaticism as the film asks whether the restoration of a ‘soul’ is even possible in a world where the living have discarded theirs for the sake of a new tracksuited identity and the false comfort of twisted nostalgia.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple neatly sidesteps the potential trap of just being a middle chapter bridging to the conclusion (and the heavily teased return of Cillian Murphy’s Jim) and refuses to be just another chase through the woods. Instead, it delivers a film of ideas, anchored by a career-best performance from Fiennes that finds the humanity in the horrific and hope amidst a hell of humanity’s own making. A bold, uncompromising, and strangely beautiful piece of British horror, it proves in a way that its immediate predecessor only hinted at, that there’s still plenty of life – and soul – left in this apocalypse.