Spoilers ahead for the plot and ending of 28 Years Later.
You can’t talk about the batshit closing moments of 28 Years Later without going back to the beginning. The film opens in the Scottish Highlands at the start of the rage-virus outbreak, with director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland returning to the fertile territory of their 2002 collaboration, 28 Days Later. A group of children has been planted in front of Teletubbies while their parents try to stave off the encroaching zombie threat — though these movies may never call the infected zombies, we’re all adults here — but the house is soon overrun. All the kids are slaughtered save for young Jimmy (Rocco Haynes), who runs off to the church to find his preacher father (Sandy Batchelor). Unfortunately, Dad isn’t interested in protecting Jimmy; he sees the rage apocalypse as the day of reckoning, and he, for one, welcomes our new zombie overlords. Jimmy is able to hide, looking on in helpless horror as his father is overtaken and infected.
The story then moves forward — you guessed it — 28 years, though it’s not until the very end that we connect with Jimmy again. The bulk of the film focuses on 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams), living a mostly peaceful life on a virus-free island with his father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and mother, Isla (Jodie Comer). 28 Years Later lightly retcons the end of 2007’s 28 Weeks Later, in which rage spreads to France and, presumably, beyond; here, it’s solely a still-quarantined U.K. where the infected remain a problem. Spike sees zombies only when Jamie takes him on a scavenging trip to the mainland, but the horrors they encounter are not enough to keep him from returning. Once Spike learns about a doctor living out there on his own, he decides to risk a journey back to the land of the infected to seek a cure for his mother, who is suffering from confusion and memory loss as a result of a mysterious illness. After confronting Jamie over his affair with another woman and essentially kicking him out of the house, Spike takes Isla into the unknown.
Anyone expecting 28 Years Later to follow the path of a traditional zombie horror movie from there will likely be disappointed by the turns the film takes in its third act — though those folks probably should have revisited the original 28 Days Later for a refresher on the kinds of stories Boyle and Garland are interested in telling. The first movie offered a bit of a bait and switch with a plot about a group of unlikely allies trying to survive a zombie outbreak evolving into something else entirely. If you haven’t revisited the film in the more than two decades since its release, you might be surprised by how much of its run time is taken up by a group of soldiers offering protection as a ruse to lure in women for sexual slavery. Even as the infected wreak havoc in 28 Days Later’s final act, it’s ultimately a showdown between two healthy humans: Cillian Murphy’s Jim and Christopher Eccleston’s Major Henry West. The movie’s reveal that the true threat is man and not the zombie hordes is one that has been repeated to the point of cliché in subsequent genre offerings, most notably The Walking Dead.
28 Years Later, meanwhile, features a different kind of rug-pulling, though it’s similarly destabilizing. Spike and Isla manage to fight off the infected with help from the Swedish NATO soldier Erik (Edvin Ryding). They pick up a baby along the way, after Erik kills an infected woman who gives birth to a healthy infant. And they eventually make it to Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who turns out not to be the maniac Jamie had warned Spike about. Yes, his appearance is a bit jarring thanks to the iodine he covers himself with to ward off the virus. His collecting of dead bodies, however, has a noble purpose: He uses the skulls of the dead to construct his bone temple, a tower that honors them and serves as a memento mori, or reminder of our collective mortality. It’s certainly gruesome to see him transform Erik’s severed head — a casualty of the infected “alpha,” who likes to collect head-and-spine trophies like a Predator — into a skull, but there’s also a strange beauty to it.
That ends up not being the only lesson about mortality that Spike gets. Kelson’s examination of Isla leads him to a gutting but not altogether surprising diagnosis. She has cancer in her breasts, lymph nodes, and brain, and she’s far past the point of treatment. Yes, the real twist of 28 Years Later is that it’s secretly a somber cancer drama. Though Spike struggles to accept that there’s nothing the doctor can do for his mother, Isla had already guessed her fate and was waiting for someone else to break the news to her son. Spike and Isla say good-bye to each other for the last time before Kelson leads her away. When he returns to Spike, it’s with Isla’s skull, which the boy places at the very top of the bone temple. The climax is equal parts touching and gruesome — and not where anyone would have imagined this movie going. Spike and Kelson have one more encounter with the alpha, but it’s a bloodless scene. The baby, which Spike names Isla, is delivered to the village, while the boy decides to strike out on his own, living among the infected in the wilderness.
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28 Years Later has one more trick up its sleeve for its final scene, however. Naturally, we move forward another 28 days later, when a slightly dirtier Spike appears to be doing pretty well for himself. He has gotten better with his bow and arrow and can fire well-targeted kill shots when the infected descend on him. There are too many coming, though, so he’s forced to run, making his way down the road until he hits a barricade of rocks. Suddenly, a new face appears. It’s a grown-up Jimmy, now played by Jack O’Connell and looking an awful lot like the disgraced English media personality Jimmy Savile. His followers emerge from hiding, a group of young people in different-colored velvet tracksuits with Targaryen-blond hair. Spike is in no position to turn down their assistance, watching as they take out the infected with a fighting style that’s a little bit parkour and a lotta bit Power Rangers. (The different colors certainly lend themselves to the latter reference, as does the appearance of Spike’s Power Rangers action figure in an early scene.) Decapitations aside, it’s a shockingly jaunty scene and the kind of wild tonal shift that has to be seen to be believed. After prioritizing character drama over zombie mayhem, 28 Years Later ends on the goofiest note imaginable.
It’s also a cliffhanger. We know that O’Connell is playing adult Jimmy but almost nothing else — aside, of course, from all the extratextual information we’ve gotten from the filmmakers and cast in the lead-up to the film’s release. We know that the character now goes by the moniker Sir Jimmy Crystal, and he appears to be the leader of a cult that has maybe deliberately styled itself after Savile. Horrifying as that may seem, allegations of Savile’s rampant sexual abuse did not emerge until after his death in 2011, nearly a decade after the onset of the rage-virus outbreak and therefore a nonissue in this universe. The group has also surely drawn inspiration from Power Rangers and, yes, Teletubbies, given the multicolored tracksuits and the fact that watching Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa, and Po is one of the last normal things Jimmy ever did. Cult members are credited online by variations of Jimmy: Jimmy Ink, Jimmy Snake, Jimmy Jimmy, and Jimmima, among others. Is it possible that Cillian Murphy’s Jim has fallen into their ranks?
Because, yes, Murphy is returning in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, the Nia DaCosta–directed sequel currently scheduled for release in January 2026, which filmed back-to-back with Boyle’s movie. In a savvy move, the promotion of 28 Years Later has not exactly gone out of its way to clarify that it’s only the first film in a planned trilogy. (The third movie has yet to be green-lit.) Boyle has revealed that Murphy plays a part in The Bone Temple and that he has a more central role in the concluding chapter of the series, should it happen. But no one is shouting this from the rooftops. Audiences have become wary of movies that feel unfinished — consider the diminished box office of Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, blamed by many on the film’s announcement of itself as an incomplete story. (The Part One has since been retconned away, but the damage was done.) To its credit, 28 Years Later doesn’t feel like the first chapter in a story for most of its run time; it’s only in that gonzo final scene that you get the sense that this story is only beginning. Unfortunately, Jimmy’s arrival is such a striking shift that his cameo ends up a frustrating tease, and the promise of so much more plot on the horizon makes the rest of the movie retroactively read as table-setting for whatever this trilogy is really about.
If Jimmy and his gang are any indication, the next film will eschew cancer drama for something more irreverent and even weirder than the turns 28 Years Later takes. “While it’s very much informed by 28 Days Later, the script for The Bone Temple is very different,” DaCosta said at a CinemaCon appearance in March. “I was able to let my freak flag fly.” There will also, surely, be darkness — the Jimmy cult may be killing the infected, but they’re not necessarily a force for good. When Spike and his father first travel to the mainland in 28 Years Later, they encounter one of the infected bound and hanging upside down with JIMMY carved into his body, not a great sign for the stability of the group Spike finds himself with at the end of the movie. But while prospects for the sequel are enticing, it’s hard not to feel a little soured on the whole enterprise by the way 28 Years Later dangles the rest of the story just out of reach. Audiences have waited nearly two decades for Boyle and Garland to pick up this saga; now they’re being asked to wait another several months to see where it’s going — and an indefinite amount of time to find out how it ends.
