After being rescued by the Fingers, which is a gang of zombie-killers led by the psycho Satan worshipper “Sir Lord” Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), young Spike (Alfie Williams) is forced to kill Jimmy Shite (Connor Newall ) in an initiation death-match. He is then given the name Jimmy like everyone in the gang.
Doctor Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) covers his skin with iodine to protect himself from the Rage Virus. He continues to build the Bone Temple out of the skulls and bones of those who die of the plague. The infected Alpha, Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) keeps visiting him and the Doctor decides he is addicted to the morphine blow-gun needles that control him. He and the Doctor develop a strange friendship.
The Fingers gang raids a farm where survivors live, including Tom (Louis Ashbourne) and his pregnant partner Cathy (Mirren Mack). Jimmy Ink (Erin Kellyman), the tattooed member of the gang and a friend of Spike, sees the Bone Temple and Doctor Kelson dancing with Samson. Cathy hides as Sir Jimmy orders the captured survivors to be skinned alive as a sacrifice to his putative father, Satan.
Kelson is running out of sedatives and decides to euthanize Samson, but Samson speaks for the first time, and the doctor thinks the virus can be treated. Jimmy Ink is becoming disillusioned with the gang-leader and takes pity on Spike and protects him. Sir Jimmy offers captured Tom a place in the gang if he can kill some member (there can only be five fingers), but he unfortunately picks the sadistic female called Jimmima (Emma Laird).
Cathy emerges and kills Jimmima as Tom sets the barn on fire. He and several gang-members die in the fire and Tom dies too. Sir Jimmy threatens to kill Spike but Jimmy Ink says they should visit Doctor Kelson because his red body suggests he is a demon. At the Bone Temple, Sir Jimmy meets Kelson alone and threatens to kill him if he does not pretend to be Satan and back Sir Jimmy as his son. The gang is beginning to fall apart, Spike tries to leave the camp but is confronted by Jimmy Fox, who brings Spike back.
Kelson does impersonate Satan spectacularly to heavy metal music while dousing the gang with powerful hallucinogens. Kelson tells the gang that God’s son Jesus was crucified and Satan’s son should be crucified too. Sir Jimmy stabs Doctor Kelson, but he is indeed crucified on an inverted cross. Spike and Ink, whose real name is Kellie, leave the Bone Temple. When they are pursued by the Infected, they are saved by a guy named Jim, who is played by Cillian Murphy from the first film.
Director Nia DaCosta did her best not to copy Danny Boyle’s directional style. Much of the production of the previous film worked on this one as well. It was written by DaCosta and Alex Garland. It was released in the U.K. in a double bill with 28 Years Later. It received critical acclaim but did not make much money. The dance of Doctor Kelson and the Infected Samson was improvised during filming. Chi Lewis-Perry had to don the full-body prosthetic body-suit over six to eight hours, 25 times a day.
Though it underperformed at the box-office, it received good marks from the reviewers for the additions to Zombie lore and the idiosyncratic filmmaking. Zombies began as shuffling creatures and then became fast in later films. This series has both, and it adds another kind of Zombie: a morbidly fat creature that crawls on the ground because it cannot walk and munches on worms and dead bodies in a particularly disgusting manner. But many of the humans in the film are just as insanely murderous as the Infected. It’s powerful and bizarre, and not for everybody.