28 Years Later's Jimmy Savile ending explained: The dark deeper meaning

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's 28 Years Later is unashamedly littered with symbolism and metaphor, from the in-your-face overtones to more subtle themes.

The director and writer make no bones about the fact that their latest British zombie horror is about our post-Brexit/COVID world amid the rise of populism and what they deem as a backwards retreat into the nostalgic.

Garland himself has shared how the new film explores how we can misremember things in our British mythic retelling of the past.

This is particularly embodied in the scene where Aaron Taylor-Johnson's Jamie publicly shares the story of his son Spike's first scavenging of the mainland.

During this sequence, the boy looks up at his dad and tries to correct him that he wasn't as heroic as his father was making out. Jamie was, in fact, mythologising his son's adventure. So what does all this have to do with Jimmy Savile?

In the final scene of 28 Years Later, Spike is alone on the mainland, being chased by infected, and is saved by an odd group led by Jack O'Connell's Sir Jimmy Crystal. He and all of his cult members are dressed like the late Sir Jimmy Savile, complete with his eccentric jewellery, tracksuits and long blonde hair. All the Jimmies hold weird makeshift weapons before cartoonishly slaying the zombies and cheering a variation of Savile's catchphrase, "How's about that then?" in unison. Characteristically, they're somewhere in between Savile himself and the ultra-violent droogs of controversial British classic A Clockwork Orange, a Stanley Kubrick film that was banned in the UK for decades.

During his lifetime, Savile was a major figure of the British establishment. He was a TV presenter who made children's dreams come true with his Jim'll Fix It show, raised millions for charity and advised the likes of Margaret Thatcher and future King Charles. Yet after his death in 2011, hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse were made against him, and the police concluded he was one of Britain's most prolific sex offenders who preyed on all ages, from minors to OAPs. As the chilling two-part Netflix documentary Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story concludes, he essentially groomed the nation and got away with it by hiding in plain sight. Yet in the alternate universe of 28 Years Later, the Rage virus outbreak brought on the zombie apocalypse in 2002. In this version of 2030, the survivors who remember Savile will know of him only in a positive light, as a national treasure who was knighted by the Queen in 1990 and was never found out for his evil crimes. This ties in with Garland's theme of Britain's misremembering the past and sugarcoating it mythically.

Spike's relationship to masculinity is explored throughout the coming-of-age story that is 28 Years Later. In the first half of the film, his father takes him out to get his first kill on the mainland, aged just 12 (three years younger than usual), where he has to face the brutal, bloody reality of infected England. Yet after being declared a man by the community upon his return, Spike discovers his dad is having an affair, and despite knowing there's a doctor on the mainland, hasn't taken his sick wife, Isla, to see him. Spike thus concludes his father wants his mother (Jodie Comer) to die, so he can be with his mistress. As a result, the boy smuggles his mum back to the mainland to walk her to the doctor. If anything, this is Garland depicting the caring masculinity (without the bravado) that Spike ends up embodying bravely, even in the face of the selfish and abrasive Swedish soldier, who gets his comeuppance. Having reached Ralph Fiennes' GP and taken on the responsibility of a foundling baby, Spike learns his mother has terminal cancer and comes to terms with death. Another loss of innocence. Yet he is now at a crossroads in his young manhood and doesn't return to his father's community, but spends 28 Days in the wilderness before encountering the Jimmy Savile cult.

Presumably, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (out in January) will see Spike mentored by Sir Jimmy Crystal, who we'd guess embodies an Andrew Tate-esque masculinity under his charismatic persona. Like Savile himself, in this world, he's being seen as a positive role model and leader rather than the monster lurking within - something young Spike will have to contend with, much like the boy in Netflix's hit Adolescence. As for O'Connell's cult leader, we also had titbits of his character throughout the first film. He was the boy in the opening scene back in 2002 when the Rage virus reached the Scottish highlands. The son of a vicar, he found his father praying in his church, manically welcoming the zombie invasion as the actual apocalypse. The priest gave his son Jimmy a crucifix before welcoming being infected himself. Flash-forward to 2030 and on the mainland Jamie and Spike discover a house with a man tied upside down with his head in a bag.

The father explained to his son that there are strange wandering people living in the mainland and that his man, who has the name "JIMMY" carved into his back, was tied up like this as punishment and had now become infected. Outside the house are the words of Revelation 1:7 graffitied on the wall with the name "JIMMY" again. The Bible verse reads: "He is coming with the clouds". This refers to the Second Coming of Christ in the Final Judgement. Yet it seems that Sir Jimmy Crystal has taken his father's strange teachings to heart, that the 2002 outbreak was the apocalypse, and he is perhaps something of a false saviour himself instead of Jesus. This ultimately manifests in the final shot of the film of Jimmy wearing his father's cross from the opening scene, but upside down. Symbolically this can be taken to mean the chaotic disorder of the new world but also a sign of the Devil, implying that Jimmy claims to be and appears to be a saviour (and positive masculine role model for Spike), but is actually a monstrous villain - further tying into why he's dressed like Savile.

In a new interview with the Independent, Boyle said: "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. I asked Alex [Garland] right at the beginning to just tell me what's the nature of each of the films, and he said that the nature of the first film is about family. The second film is about the nature of evil. And you're about to meet a lot more of them when it'll be more appropriate to talk about them in the second film."

Finally, it's very much worth noting that Cillian Murphy is reprising his 28 Day Later starring role as Jim in sequel 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. Given his name, we'd assume he's part of the Jimmy cult, too. Although, as the hero of the first film who killed soldiers trying to rape two women, we'd guess he's either infiltrated them or been banished from their community.

28 Years Later is out now in cinemas and 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple hits cinemas on January 16, 2026.