Sponsored by Sony Pictures
In 2026, Nia DaCosta will achieve a feat unheard of for Black women directors in Hollywood: premiering two feature films in less than a year. Fresh on the heels of the 2025 fall premiere of her award-winning period adaptation Hedda, DaCosta’s highly-anticipated addition to the 28 Days Later zombie franchise, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple will hit theaters on January 15. Poised to be the first cinematic event of the year, DaCosta’s film is projected to earn more than $20 million in its MLK Day opening weekend.
A bastion of firsts, DaCosta holds the crown as the first Black woman director to premiere at #1 at the box office with her horror reboot Candyman (2021); the first Black woman director of an MCU film with The Marvels (2023); and, with the same film, she became the highest-grossing Black woman director in history. Now, taking the reins from director Danny Boyle, DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, solidifies her as a bonafide visionary.
Shot on location in the U.K., The Bone Temple has been met with rapturous early screening reviews, premiering with a 97% score on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics praising the frightening, gory installment as the franchise’s most emotionally and physically brutal. Once again, DaCosta steps into a familiar franchise world and reinvents it, infusing it with her striking and distinct visual language.
Mirroring Britain’s isolationism in a covid-riddled, post-Brexit world, The Bone Temple continues the story of 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) who was saved in the last film from a pack of zombie-like humans infected with the rage virus by an even worse pack of humans: the Jimmys. Bone Temple picks up there, with Spike now fighting for his life and a spot with the Jimmys. Led by a terrifying and hilarious Jack O’Connell as Jimmy Crystal, the Jimmys are a sadistic, satanic cult that brings death and destruction to humans and infected alike.
DaCosta’s crescendo in a film full of inventive scenes comes at the end when three-time Oscar-nominated Ralph Fiennes’ Dr. Kelson performs the most electric, captivating dance for the Jimmys at the titular Bone Temple to Iron Maiden’s “Number of the Beast.” In this dance, DaCosta achieves one of her own, showing both the scope of this world and its minutiae with equal vigor and craft, making 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple a must-see on the biggest screen possible.
Beyond being a reliable source of big-screen entertainment, DaCosta has also centered Black women’s survival in every film since her 2018 directorial debut crime thriller Little Woods. In DaCosta’s hands, the depth of Black women’s rage, love and humanity are safe and celebrated. Erin Kellyman’s stand-out performance in The Bone Temple is the latest example. Starring as Jimmy Ink, a badass killer in the Jimmys cult, Kellyman portrays a conflicted young woman with an extraordinary capacity for empathy, considering the ruthless ways she kills anything blocking her path. Doubting her leader and his beliefs, Ink leans into her own power and evolves her thinking to reckon with a new reality: there are no gods or devils; just human beings and the choices they make to create the world.
This message of the possibility of choice and hopefulness in a world of devastation couldn’t be more timely. Unlimited by genre, DaCosta’s films share this throughline, providing both entertainment and deft social commentary. At just 36-years old and five films in, DaCosta is beyond one to watch. An in-demand writer, director and producer, DaCosta is setting a new pace for what Black women filmmakers can achieve in this industry when their vision and genius get the support they deserve.
Stay watchin’,
Brooke
Leave a Reply