Source: Entertainment Weekly

With 28 Years Later, director Danny Boyle reunites with his 28 Days Later screenwriter Alex Garland to amp up the horrors of fighting off the dead — all while painting a more searing portrait about what it means to be alive.

Newcomer Alfie Williams breathes new life into the pulsating horror as Spike, a 12-year-old boy who resides on a small British island with a community of survivors, 28 years after the rage virus first ravaged the United Kingdom. When he learns that a doctor, Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), resides on the mainland amongst the infected, the intrepid Spike embarks on a perilous journey to transport his ailing mother Isla (Jodie Comer) — who suffers from a mysterious illness that has rendered her with memory loss and debilitating headaches — to the doctor in hopes of saving her.

Kelson, however, finds Isla and Spike before they find him, coming to the rescue when the duo are targeted by an infected variant referred to as an alpha. Contrary to what Spike had been told, Kelson, though wildly eccentric, is compassionate and kind — this despite the optics of him living amongst a bone temple. Literally. He collects the bones of humans and infected who’ve died to memorialize their lives, having constructed towering shrines of skulls and bones that help shed more insight into the forthcoming sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.

“There’s a warmth to him,” Fiennes tells Entertainment Weekly of his “unusual” character. “He’s very pleased to see people who are not infected.”

Kelson is able to assess that Isla is dying from cancer. The matriarch decides to end her suffering, and it’s Spike who memorializes her by placing her bones atop one of the shrines. The movie ends with a grieving Spike traversing the mainland solo, refusing to return to the island and his father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) until he’s had time to mourn. A horde of infected closes in on Spike in the final moments before the credits roll, but a ragtag crew of survivors in tracksuits swoop in to help the boy, one of whom is a familiar face: a Scottish man named Jimmy (played by Jack O’Connell), who was briefly introduced in the opening scene as a young boy who survives a horde of infected on the Scottish Isles.

Plot details for The Bone Temple are still under wraps, but expect to see more of Fiennes’ Kelson in the sequel. In theaters Jan. 16, 2026, The Bone Temple was filmed back-to-back with 28 Years Later and directed not by Boyle but Candyman and The Marvels’ Nia DaCosta. (Garland also penned the sequel’s script.) Boyle has also confirmed that 28 Days Later star Cillian Murphy, also an executive producer on this latest entry, will reprise his role as Jim.

“Obviously I can’t give too much away,” Fiennes tells EW when pressed on the sequel. He does, however, cite one memorable scene as integral to how the story unfolds: Isla helping a pregnant infected (!) through childbirth on an abandoned train.

“I can say that the themes that we touched on in the scene on the train, the moment of labor, the humanity — it is a critical moment in the life of a mother and child,” Fiennes says. “The ultimate human moment is an infected woman who is giving birth to a baby who is not infected. The theme of innate humanity — is it still alive in the soul, in the heart, in the mind of an infected person? Are they completely corrupted? Are they only rabid? Or is there the possibility of something? Something human, it’s still there.”

Fiennes also notes the “human violence” at the center of the rite of passage that Spike partakes in with his father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) of hunting and killing Infected to become a man. “We carry in us the potential for terrible destruction and pain,” Fiennes says. “That theme is picked up very strongly in the next film.”

28 Years Later is in theaters now.

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