Nia DaCosta gravitates toward stories -- whether intimate dramas, horror reinventions, literary adaptations, or major franchises -- where her characters are pushed into extreme situations. Across these films, human vulnerability and choice remain central, with complex interior lives sharpening as the stakes escalate outward.
"All of my films have to do with people who are on the fringes of society," DaCosta told MovieMaker in 2025. "People on the fringes feel as though they don't have the authority to fully live."
On January 16, DaCosta's fifth feature, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026), premieres in the United States. This much-anticipated film is the direct follow-up to 28 Years Later (2025), shifting the Rage Virus saga from sheer survival into a darker phase of cult-like power and mythmaking. It narrows in on Ralph Fiennes's Dr. Ian Kelson, introduced in the previous film as a mainland doctor who collects human skulls for a macabre temple, and on the emergence of a cult of Jimmy Savile impersonators, first glimpsed in the final moments of the last film. Together, these threads suggest an apocalypse no longer driven only by infection, but by the dangerous stories people begin to worship.
Born in Brooklyn in 1989, DaCosta first aspired to be a writer. A pivotal moment came when DaCosta took an English class in which her teacher assigned Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now alongside Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. DaCosta went on to pursue a career in filmmaking at New York University. Soon after graduating, she landed on the sets of Martin Scorsese, Steve McQueen, and Steven Soderbergh as a production assistant.
During her free time, DaCosta began writing scripts, completing Little Woods in 2015, a gritty two-sisters story set in a struggling North Dakota border town. After creating a $5,000 short-film version for the Sundance Screenwriters and Directors Labs, it was picked up by Neon and premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2018, where it received the Nora Ephron Award. The following year, it was released nationwide. This places DaCosta firmly in the public eye.
For her next film, Jordan Peele tapped DaCosta to co-write and direct the spiritual sequel to the 1991 Candyman. This was a personal victory for DaCosta, who told the Guardian, "I don't think he knew how big of a fan I was, until I mentioned a particular sketch and he was, like, 'Whoa, that's a deep cut.'"
Soon after, DaCosta was selected to direct The Marvels (2023). Though largely panned by critics, many agreed the film's one bright spot was DaCosta's direction. And, by the numbers, the $46.1 million debut marked the highest-grossing premiere for a Black woman director.
DaCosta then turned back to drama with Hedda (2025), a modern reimagining of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, turning a single disastrous party into a tense psychological study of desire and manipulation. She teamed up with her friend Tessa Thompson, who first worked with DaCosta for Little Woods. Now, she is veering back to horror with The Bone Temple, a genre uniquely suited to her interest in fear as a social force.
"You can really push people out of their comfort zones," DaCosta told NPR in 2025. "You can be really confrontational in horror films because people go into horror films the way they get onto a roller coaster."
For this edition of Playback, I'm rolling back the tape on DaCosta's uniquely intense yet stylistically varied filmography.
Little Woods (2018)
Little Woods (2018) turns a border-town hustle into a sisterhood thriller. In DaCosta's feature debut, two women gamble everything on one last illegal run to buy back their future.
Ollie Hale (Tessa Thompson) is on probation after being caught crossing illegally between North Dakota and Canada. Once a drug dealer, Ollie has just eight days left before she can leave the state. She's trying to go straight and relocate to Spokane to work. But her estranged sister, Deb (Lily James), already raising her son Johnny, is pregnant and broke; foreclosure on their mother's house looms, so the sisters consider selling the pills Ollie hid. Their plan pulls them back into the orbit of a local dealer, turning a desperate bid for stability into a race against time and the law.
As soon as Little Woods premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2018, DaCosta was cemented as one of the most promising new directors of her generation. It paved the way for the director's interest in high-octane storytelling and complicated characters.
Candyman (2021)
Three decades after the original Candyman (2021) embedded racial trauma into a slasher myth, the 2021 film reopens that wound for a new generation.
Chicago artist Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) goes digging around Cabrini-Green for inspiration, meets local William Burke (Colman Domingo), and learns the "say Candyman five times" curse. Inspired by this encounter, Anthony creates an art piece for a gallery owned by his girlfriend, Brianna Cartwright (Teyonah Parris). It makes the legend go viral, and the killing starts to spread. The twist: "Candyman" is a "hive," a lineage of murdered Black men, each created by racial violence and absorbed into the legend. Beneath the slasher mechanics, Candyman is a film about how memory turns pain into myth.
"I think Candyman is definitely a monster, for sure," DaCosta told Collider in 2021. "In ways, he can also be an anti-hero. He's multifaceted. For me, he represents how we change people from people into idols or martyrs or icons or representations of a thing, as opposed to living, breathing human beings. He's definitely a monster. It's a horror movie. He's definitely a villain, of a sort. But we wanted to deconstruct who decided he was a monster, who gave him that name, and how he got there in the first place."
Hedda (2025)
Hedda turns Henrik Ibsen's 19th-century tragedy into a modern psychological thriller set over the course of a single disastrous night. Tessa Thompson's Hedda hosts a party where desire becomes sabotage and a "manuscript" becomes kindling.
In 1950s England, Hedda Gabler Tesman hosts a carefully staged party meant to secure a professorship for her husband (Tom Bateman). This is destabilized when her former lover, Dr. Eileen Lovborg (Nina Hoss), arrives. When Thea Clifton (Imogen Poots) -- Eileen's partner and collaborator -- brings news of their co-authored manuscript on sexuality, Hedda begins manipulating the room, engineering humiliation, stealing the only copy, and ultimately destroying it.
This pressure-chamber drama marks a genre shift for DaCosta, yet she retains many of her same sensibilities in the characters. Even without horror or monsters, DaCosta makes the room itself feel dangerous, charged with the threat of unwieldy desire.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026) turns the "Rage Virus" saga into a story about belief. DaCosta uses horror to examine what people cling to in order to survive.
DaCosta's film kicks off immediately after the closing of Danny Boyle's 28 Years Later (2025), which followed Spike (Alfie Williams) as he loses his mother on the British mainland. At the start of this film, Spike is coerced into joining a cult of Satanic murderers, led by Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell) -- a bona fide psychopath modeling his appearance after the infamous Jimmy Savile and believing himself to be the rightful heir to Satan.
Meanwhile, Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), a former medical doctor, spends his days collecting bones for his ossuary -- the titular bone temple. But one day, as he walks back to the temple, Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) -- a dangerous alpha zombie -- approaches him with an unsettling, almost curious interest. It's here that Kelson decides to dedicate himself to swaying the rageful zombie's mind, believing it possible to clear away the cloud of the virus and uncover one's mind again.
DaCosta has delivered the best "Rage Virus" film since 28 Days Later (2002). At first, the film's gore-forward spectacle raises doubts about its viability, particularly since it felt like an addendum when it was announced. Yet, this is the most lucid examination of the post-apocalyptic human psyche we've seen in these films. O'Connell and the other Jimmies (particularly Erin Kellyman as Jimmy Ink and Emma Laird as Jimmima) channel varying levels of bloodthirst, where the desperate need for survival fuels the vile instincts within them.
By contrast, Kelson's experiments with Samson provide a striking counterpoint to that depravity, suggesting that the virus doesn't simply destroy the mind but clouds it with something closer to psychosis. Fiennes delivers an all-too-good performance as Kelson, as he tirelessly tends to his bone temple and dances with the sedated Samson.
Here, evil emerges from humanity under pressure, with Alex Garland's script placing these two stories side by side to probe what actually makes someone monstrous. This is exactly the story we might expect to spark DaCosta's interest. For a filmmaker drawn to lives lived on the margins, The Bone Temple may be her most revealing work so far.