The visceral, often stomach-churningly violent "28 Years Later: The Bone Temple" is about the search for hope, humanity and a few good Duran Duran songs after the landscape has been ravaged by a zombie apocalypse.

Director Nia DaCosta (2021's "Candyman," last year's "Hedda") picks up right where Danny Boyle's frantic "28 Years Later" left off last year. But where Boyle's film was choppy and erratically paced, DaCosta is able to slow the tempo and take her time with the story and its characters. If "28 Years Later" is a supercharged Red Bull, "The Bone Temple" is a contemplative cup of afternoon tea.

That doesn't mean it's not a ripsaw of a ride, but its downshift in velocity is best exemplified in the relationship between Dr. Ian Kelson (an iodine- and dry blood-covered Ralph Fiennes) and Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), which forms the emotional core of "The Bone Temple."

Ian is a doctor living on his own in a trailer (don't worry, he's got a good collection of Duran Duran and Radiohead records on vinyl) on the grounds of his striking monument to death, the Bone Temple of the title. He's trying to cure the infected of their singular drive toward flesh eating and spine ripping, and the hulking Samson is an Alpha zombie whose chief interests — in fact, his only interests — are flesh eating and spine ripping.

But Ian finds what he believes to be a cure for the disease, and he makes Samson his test patient. And after heavy sedation, Ian forms a sort of one-sided friendship with Samson, who in his heavily numbed state becomes a kind of gentle (if nearly comatose) giant.

It's been so long since Ian has had real human contact that he longs for time with his newfound friend, and they're able to relax, take naps and even dance together. Fiennes, as fine an actor as is working today, finds the compassion in the relationship, and Lewis-Parry identifies the gentle soul inside his vicious, crazed monster. Theirs is a buddy film of true warmth.

But this is far from a kumbaya world in which they find themselves, and Jack O'Connell's Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal — the psychopathic, filthy-teethed, tracksuit-wearing killer who was introduced in "28 Years Later's" jarring, ripcord conclusion — represents the evil that has risen in the wake of the zombie plague. Jimmy's no zombie, he's maybe worse: he leads a group of young, heartless killers, all named Jimmy (save for the female Jimmima), whom he treats as his personal army.

Jimmy and the Jimmys — the squad of youngsters includes Spike (Alfie Williams), who was kidnapped by Jimmy at the end of "28 Years" — eventually cross paths with Ian, whom Jimmy thinks might be Satan, which in his mind would make him his father. Their eventual showdown makes for a heavy metal moment for the ages, and a scene unlike anything Fiennes has ever given us in his career.

Screenwriter Alex Garland, on a roll in recent years (see 2024's "Civil War" and 2025's "Warfare"), spends a great deal of time developing his characters, time which wasn't allotted in "28 Years," even if he struggles to find a way to bring them all together in a wholly convincing manner.

But the care DaCosta gives the characters, and the life the actors bring to them, is soulful and enriching, even moving. Which is a lot to ask in the fourth chapter of a zombie apocalypse series, but these movies have taken such weird and unpredictable turns that "The Bone Temple" feels just right for what it is. You can't definitively say this is always where the series was headed, but DaCosta makes it feel like a welcome stop on this series' twisting pathway. (And yes, the movie sets itself up for another chapter.)

Be warned, "The Bone Temple" is spiked with violence that is often gruesome in its execution. But it's a film with a soul and a yearning for life, which finds that good can be found even in the most despondent of situations, in a place as far from an ordinary world as our own.

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'28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE'

Grade: B+

MPA rating: R (for strong bloody violence, gore, graphic nudity, language throughout, and brief drug use)

Running time: 1:49

How to watch: In theaters Jan. 16

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