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It’s hard to overstate just how influential 28 Days Later has been. The 2002 film – in which courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes from a coma to find the UK consumed by the “rage virus”, causing those infected to rip anyone nearby apart – was the blueprint for the past two decades of zombie media. It is a brutal take on violence erupting in an already rotten society.

It would have been easy for the franchise’s new trilogy of films to simply replicate this formula. But 2025’s 28 Years Later, the first of the three, set decades after the initial outbreak, blew up the foundations of the series and transformed it into something new and fascinating. In telling the story of Spike (Alfie Williams), a 12-year-old boy from a virus-free island off the ravaged mainland of Britain, it revealed the speciation of the formerly indistinguishable infected, introducing Alphas like Samson (Chi-Lewis Parry) who are capable of strategic thought.

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The truly homogeneous horde we see in , the trilogy’s middle act from director Nia DaCosta, written by Alex Garland, isn’t the infected, but the Jimmys, a gang of youths with a hankering for bloodsport. They are all “Jimmy”, stripped of their former names and dressed in the garb of real-life British children’s entertainer Jimmy Savile. Their leader, a satanist known as Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), calls them all “fingers”, commanding them to form a collective “fist” when it pleases him.

The Jimmys’ regression, from their childlike interest in the Teletubbies to their lack of basic morality, threatens to poison Spike too. In The Bone Temple’s first scene, we see Spike fight and kill a Jimmy to save his own life – and then become one of them. It is his first murder of an uninfected person, a distinction that initially seems to matter a great deal.

But perhaps it shouldn’t. The Bone Temple continues to expand on what the infected are capable of and how we ought to view them. We pick up with former doctor Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), Spike’s friend and the creator of the ossuary that gives the film its title. He has been routinely immobilising Samson with a morphine dart whenever he strays too close, but Samson seems to crave the release the drug gives him, returning to Kelson to be sent into blessed stupefaction.

Slowly, through morphine-fuelled dancing and hours spent staring at the sky, the pair build some kind of relationship. We know Kelson to be an anthropologist of sorts, preserving and cataloguing culture by building memorials and scavenging records from abandoned towns. Now, he is investigating Samson’s faculties, hunting for further signs of higher consciousness. “Most wondrous it’d be to hear you speak a single word,” he says. “Do you have memories? A trace of what you once were? Or do I just give you peace and respite?”

Once again, The Bone Temple asks us to consider speciation. Does Samson represent something separate from humanity that is rapidly evolving to surpass it, or a step towards the infected recovering some semblance of their former selves? Are they moving forwards or backwards? Can a person shift from an infected state to a cured one and, decades into the outbreak, might the clean separation of the two be a false dichotomy?

The psychological lens Kelson brings to these thorny questions leads him to some startling revelations. And when he inevitably crosses paths with the Jimmys, he arrives at something that could help all the remnants of humanity, infected or otherwise, heal. Of all the takeaways from this brutal, brilliant film, the biggest is that our understanding of the infected needs to evolve. As compelling as it has been to follow Spike as he grows up in this hellish world, it might be time for the infected to inherit the Earth – or at least become the franchise’s heroes. With the final instalment of the trilogy confirmed, I can’t wait to see what happens next.