28 Years Later is a superb, multifaceted horror movie with a lot of different things on its mind, and over its two hours it moves through quite a few tonal shifts: folk horror, coming-of-age family drama, gory action movie, and surreal meditation on societal breakdown. Even in this context, though, the ending is jarring, and might leave viewers wondering: What was that all about?
On one level, it’s a setup for the film’s sequel. Screenwriter Alex Garland wrote a trio of scripts for the return of the zombie franchise, and the second of these, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, has already been shot and will be released in January 2026. 28 Years Later’s final scene clearly sets up characters who will play a big part in the next movie.
But viewers outside the U.K. may not realize that the scene has an additional, shocking layer to it, because it makes explicit reference to perhaps the single most reviled figure in British contemporary culture: the media personality and prolific sexual abuser Jimmy Savile.
To say the least, it’s a bold choice, and it leaves the filmmakers with a very fine line to tread in The Bone Temple. Let’s dig in.
[Ed. note: The rest of this article contains full spoilers for the ending of 28 Years Later.]
What happens at the end of 28 Years Later?
28 Years Later’s final act is dominated by an elegiac passage, in which the young hero Spike (Alfie Williams) says goodbye to his mother Isla (Jodie Comer), who has accepted a peaceful death at the hands of Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) rather than suffer through her cancer. Spike then chooses to go walkabout on the infected-infested mainland rather than return to his island community, after dropping the baby he and Isla found back at the island.
Twenty-eight days later, Spike is attacked by a group of infected. Escaping them, he is rescued by a colorful group of crazed warriors who attack the infected in flamboyant style. Their leader is Jimmy (Jack O’Connell), who was the Scottish boy seen in the movie’s prologue set at the start of the outbreak. He wears the crucifix his priest father gave him upside down.
Photo: Sony Pictures
After the moving and meditative end of the film proper, this final scene is a total change of mood. O’Connell’s lines are played for broad laughs, the soundtrack mixes the Teletubbies theme with loud punk music, and the style employed by director Danny Boyle is frenetic and irreverent.
But the imagery is also extremely sinister, because the gang’s gaudy tracksuits, gold jewelery, and long blond wigs are clearly modeled on Jimmy Savile. As if there were any doubt, the credits seal it — O’Connell’s character is referred to as Sir Jimmy Crystal. Anyone outside the U.K. is likely wondering…
If you grew up in Britain in the late 20th century, as I did, Sir James Savile was an inescapable, kind of clownish, but also beloved pop cultural figure. He came to prominence as a radio DJ in the 1960s and was a TV fixture through the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s as a presenter of the Top of the Pops chart show and Jim’ll Fix It, a sentimental early-evening variety show in which he made the wishes of kids come true.
His persona was that of a benevolent weird uncle. His mannered, catchphrase-heavy delivery and signature look — often embellished with tinted glasses and huge cigar — were much mocked and imitated, and made him incredibly famous. He was known for tireless charity work, particularly fundraising for hospitals, which led to his knighthood in 1990.
After his death in 2011, claims of rape and sexual abuse by Savile — which had been a distant rumor during his life — started to solidify. Over the following years the truly horrifying scale of his crimes became clear through criminal investigations and public inquiries. His victims numbered in the hundreds over five decades, and included many children and vulnerable people. Many of his crimes were perpetrated at the hospitals he visited under the guise of his charitable work. He appears to have been protected and his actions covered up by bosses at the BBC, in the National Health Service, and by other establishment figures.
So, in the U.K., Savile’s indelible public image has become synonymous with predatory evil — as well as with the hypocrisy and corruptibility of the establishment.
What does Jimmy Savile mean in 28 Years Later’s world?
The first film in Boyle and Garland’s zombie series, 28 Days Later, shows Britain being completely ravaged by the Rage Virus in 2002. It follows that in this world, Savile’s crimes were never exposed, and he would live on in the mind of survivors like Jimmy as a national treasure: the famous, funny weirdo who was nice to little kids on TV.
Or would he? Jimmy, a young boy in 2002, may not even have been born when Jim’ll Fix It went off the air in 1994. After that, though he was still famous, Savile’s ubiquity in British culture started to wane. He is not quite as potent a figure for U.K. millennials as he is for Gen Xers like Danny Boyle, Alex Garland, and me, because they don’t have any positive associations with him from childhood. So it’s questionable why Savile would loom so large in Jimmy’s imagination that he would style his cult after him. (Teletubbies makes much more sense; the iconic preschoolers’ show originally ran from 1997 to 2001.)
Why did the filmmakers use Savile?
There’s a clear dramatic irony to the use of Jimmy Savile imagery in 28 Years Later. U.K. viewers know about his crimes, while the characters don’t. For us, he’s a symbol of evil. For O’Connell’s character and his acolytes, he’s a preposterous, half-remembered image of a bygone Britain.
Asked about the use of Savile imagery, Boyle told Business Insider, “He’s as much to do with pop culture as he is to do with sportswear, to do with cricket, to do with the honors system. It’s all kind of twisting in this partial remembrance, clinging onto things and then recreating them as an image for followers.”
In the same interview, Garland called Sir Jimmy Crystal “a sort of trippy, fucked up kaleidoscope” and also referred to the deceptive power of nostalgia. “The thing about looking back is how selective memory is,” Garland said. “It cherry picks and it has amnesia, and crucially, it also misremembers. We are living in a time right now which is absolutely dominated by a misremembered past.”
It seems like Garland and Boyle are using Savile to make the point that the nationalist nostalgia behind movements like Brexit (a clear inspiration for 28 Years Later’s vision of an isolated Britain) clings to a romanticized past that was, in reality, much darker.
What does this mean for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple?
Boyle has said that The Bone Temple “is about the nature of evil,” and that Sir Jimmy Crystal is the embodiment of this evil. “The role of Jack O’Connell’s character and his family, which is a replacement, really, for the family he loses at the beginning of the film, is to reintroduce evil into what has become a compassionate environment,” he told The Independent. It seems as though The Bone Temple may shift the series’ emphasis away from the infected and on to a more human antagonist.
While it may not be controversial to associate Savile with evil, it’s of questionable taste to use the image of a man with hundreds of living victims just to make a point or to get a reaction. The filmmakers certainly seem to be in provocateur mode in the ending of 28 Years Later; O’Connell is unafraid to be deliciously entertaining in his Savile-style get-up, while Boyle amps up his shooting and editing style into something that’s almost a parody of his punk-rock Trainspotting heyday.
This kind of provocation is one thing as a surprise coda, and another as the basis for an entire movie. It’s also one thing coming from Boyle, who is himself an icon of the “Cool Britannia” 1990s and is deeply fluent in the country’s iconography (so much so that he directed the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics). But Boyle isn’t directing The Bone Temple; that task falls to an American, Nia DaCosta (Candyman, The Marvels), who can’t have the same level of familiarity with the subject matter.
It all leaves DaCosta with some fascinating but very tricky British cultural territory to navigate in The Bone Temple. She’ll have Garland’s script as a map, and presumably the guidance of both Garland and Boyle as producers. But in the U.K. — where Savile’s image has gone from ever-present to all but forbidden over the past 15 years — it can’t help but be intensely controversial.
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