Spoilers! Who is that mystery man at the end of '28 Years Later'?
Spoiler alert! We're discussing important plot points and the ending of “28 Years Later” (in theaters now), so beware if you haven’t seen it yet.
The horror sequel “28 Years Later” introduces several new characters into the post-apocalyptic world director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland envisioned in 2002’s “28 Days Later.” And the most fascinating personality is the first person we meet in the new movie who we don’t get to see again until the very end.
“28 Years” centers on a quarantined U.K. three decades after a rage virus broke out and infected habitants, turning them into zombie-like people. In an isolated survivor community on Holy Island, 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) is taken to the mainland for the first time by his dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) to kill an infected.
Spike learns of a mysterious doctor named Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) so, with his mother Isla (Jodie Comer) ailing from an unknown disease, he returns to the mainland to find him. There, Spike runs afoul of the muscular infected Alpha known as Samson and witnesses his mom help an infected woman give birth. (The baby, shockingly, seems healthy, though its mom dies.) They then are saved by the odd but compassionate Kelson, from whom Spike gets an important lesson on life and remembering death.
Let’s dig into the biggest spoilers and lingering questions, including who that bad guy is in the film's final moments and what fans should expect in the next installment, “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” (out Jan. 16):
What happens in the ending of '28 Years Later'?
Kelson examines Isla and discovers she has breast cancer − it’s spread to other parts of her body and is terminal. He helps to end her life, burns the body and returns the skull to Spike so he can place it atop Kelson’s extremely tall Bone Temple, which memorializes the dead. Kelson helps Spike and the baby to escape another attack but Samson follows Spike to the island, where the Alpha is killed. But instead of staying, Spike leaves the baby with his dad to be raised on the island while he decides to live his life on the mainland.
In the final scene, Spike is attacked on a road by a bunch of infected but is saved by a group of blond-haired strangers, and that's where the unnerving Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) introduces himself. In the movie's opening, Jimmy is seen as a child at the outbreak of the virus, watching “Teletubbies” before infected family members attack each other. His preacher father is scarily happy to see God’s Day of Judgment come, and he gives his son a cross, which as an adult Jimmy wears upside down on a necklace.
Jimmy and his cult – with names like Jimmima and Jimmy Ink, and a violently amusing air a la Alex and the Droogs from “A Clockwork Orange” – feature "very heavily" in “Bone Temple,” Boyle promises. “The first film is about grief and the nature of family. And these Jimmies are one of the families that it sort of looks at. But the second film is about the nature of evil.”
Garland adds that Jimmy is "someone genuinely frightening, but we understand how he got to be how he is. And the most interesting interaction for me is what happens when Kelson meets Jimmy.”
What is the secret website in ’28 Years Later’?
If you visit the fictional “dark web” page RageLeaks.net, it fills in the blanks about what’s happened in the U.K. since the rage virus broke out, maps that show the geography of this part of Europe after three decades, and other interesting world-building elements. (Need the password? It's "mementomori" – Kelson's favorite phrase.)
What is Cillian Murphy’s role in ’28 Years Later’?
Murphy, who won a best actor for “Oppenheimer,” was the main star of “28 Days Later” playing bicycle courier Jim, who wakes up in a hospital after a traffic accident to find an empty London and an infected England. His main role in “28 Years Later” is actually as an executive producer: He doesn’t appear on camera but Boyle has said that Murphy will appear at the end of “Bone Temple” and play a central part in a planned third movie. Wonder if Jim will have something to do with Jimmy and the Jimmies?
Does ’28 Years Later’ have a post-credits scene?
It does not, but the ending hints at where things might go and who they’ll involve, from Kelson to that little baby. And “plenty of challenges” await Spike in “Bone Temple,” Boyle teases. (Garland wrote the next movie but Nia DaCosta will be in the director’s chair.) “It's not going to be easy what he will have to overcome in the second film.”
Boyle believes “Bone Temple” is “the most original piece of screenwriting since ‘A Clockwork Orange.' There were lots of people saying, ‘Oh, we should change this, we should cut this. It's too disturbing.’ And it is disturbing and it is risky.
“The first film stands alone and the second film will stand alone,” he says, “but they are umbilically connected in a way that will enrich the experience eventually.”