Sony The end of March is very early to be making any kind of predictions about the best of anything in any given year. And yet, Ralph Fiennes’ performance in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple revolves around a scene that’s so exciting, so fun, and so full-throttle audacious, it’s inspiring us to be a little reckless as well. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple was released in theaters on January 16 this year, early enough that the film is set to hit Netflix by the end of March. It’s a direct sequel to 2025’s 28 Years Later — also currently streaming on Netflix — and completes story arcs featuring characters that were first introduced in the earlier film. We pick up with young Spike (Alfie Williams) enduring a horrific ritual as part of his forced initiation into the sadistic post-apocalyptic murder cult/gang The Jimmies, who were introduced at the very end of 28 Years Later. For those who don’t know (mostly Americans — this is a very British detail in a very British film), The Jimmies model themselves after Jimmy Saville, the disgraced comedian and TV presenter who was exposed as a horrific sexual predator after his demise in 2011. Of course, in the 28 Years Later universe, Saville was never exposed, given that the world as we know it ended when the Rage Virus furst appeared in 2002. (The fate of the real Jimmy Saville in this alternate timeline is never addressed, but one can only hope that he was ripped to pieces by hungry Infected.) Still, the Jimmies seem to have intuitively become their worst selves by association — particularly their leader Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), whose backstory connects the cold open from 28 Years Later with the series’ larger arc. The Bone Temple is centered around a gruesome torture scene, which director Nia DaCosta — who takes over for Danny Boyle, and is also working from a script by the great Alex Garland — films from an artfully detached distance. That doesn’t make the sequence any less stomach-churning, however, and if it wasn’t obvious before, it’s very clear after that point that these Jimmies are bad dudes.Thankfully, The Bone Temple also reconnects us with Dr. Ian Kelson, played unforgettably by the great Ralph Fiennes. Although he was a minor character, all things considered, in 28 Years Later, we spend a considerable amount of time with Dr. Kelson in The Bone Temple, finding out details about his daily life and how he stays at least relatively sane while literally building a cathedral of bones all around him. As it turns out, his record collection is the key to keeping Dr. Kelson on point, and the film shows him dancing around his solitary empire to Duran Duran and Radiohead on LP.That brings us to the best scene in any horror movie so far this year. Because The Bone Temple is completing an arc that began in 28 Years Later, it’s inevitable that Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal and Dr. Ian Kelson would meet up eventually. And when they do, it’s in a fiery, hallucinogenics-induced vision of Hell that has the Jimmies howling at the moon. Basically, Sir Lord Jimmy has convinced the younger Jimmies that the depraved brutality they inflict on fellow survivors is being done on the orders of Satan, who they call “Old Nick.” The younger Jimmies are terrified of “Old Nick,” which inspires Dr. Kelson to create a pyrotechnics-fueled spectacular designed to shock and awe these pint-sized psychopaths. He soaks the grass around the Temple’s central pillar, hangs hundreds of candles from the bone “trees,” and paints himself red and blackens his teeth to look more demonic. But Kelson’s secret weapon comes from his record collection: The title song from Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast. Even “Run to the Hills” partisans have to admit that the song is pretty awesome, but a crumb of context helps here as well: Keep in mind that, while Dr. Kelson and Sir Lord Jimmy remember the days before the Rage Virus and thus have context about Iron Maiden, the younger Jimmies have no idea what heavy metal even is. (Was? Are there any metal bands in the post-apocalypse? A topic for another sequel, perhaps.) Watching with this in mind makes the scene even more spectacular. But even — or perhaps especially —fans of the band can appreciate the Satanic majesty of Ralph Fiennes baring his teeth and frolicking around the film’s majestic temple of bones like a mischievous Devil in a cartoon. He’s frightening, but he’s clearly also having fun: “It was like this rolling train, or rolling snow down a hill until it was the perfect snowball,” DaCosta said about filming the scene in a recent interview with Rue Morgue, It’s the centerpiece of a sequel that’s way better than it needs to be, and it’s now streaming on Netflix. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is now streaming on Netflix.